Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

JOURNAL for the

STUDY of

ANTISEMITISM

Volume 3, Issue #2, 2011Campus Antisemitism

Guest Editor, Kenneth L. Marcus

http://jewishresearch.org/Gary_Tobin_Video.html

Gary A. Tobin(1949-2009)

Gary A. Tobin was one of the first to see the dangers of thenew antisemitism on American college campuses and

one of the strongest voices in resisting it.

Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA)Steven K. Baum and Neal E. Rosenberg, Editors, Marlton, NJSteven L. Jacobs, Associate Editor; Judaic Studies, University of AlabamaLesley Klaff, Associate Editor/Law, Sheffield Hallam University, UKFlorette Cohen, Associate Editor/Research, College of Staten IslandKenneth L. Marcus, Associate Editor/Academia, IJCR & Louis D. Brandeis Center, DCShimon Samuels, Chair, Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Paris

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, AHA Foundation, AEI, Washington, DCPaul Bartrop, Historian, Bialik College, Melbourne, AustraliaHadassa Ben-Itto, Author/Judge (Ret.), Tel AvivMichael Berenbaum, Sigi Ziering Institute, Los AngelesAndrew Bostom, Brown University, Providence, RIJonathan Boyd, Jewish Policy Research, LondonIsrael W. Charny, Encyclopedia of Genocide, JerusalemRichard L Cravatts, Education, Boston UniversityBernie Farber, Canadian Jewish Congress, TorontoRobert Fine, Sociology, University of Warwick, UKManfred Gerstenfeld, JCPA, JerusalemSander Gilman, Humanities, Emory University, AtlantaAri Goldberg, AIPAC, Washington, DCClemens Heni, Political Science—MEF Funded, BerlinJim Heller, Gadfly/Blogger, Victoria, BCDouglas Hoffman, Grant Writer, New Mexico State UniversityPaul Iganski, Sociology, Lancaster University, UKDennis L. Jackson, Statistics, University of WindsorAndras Kovacs, Sociology, Central European University, BudapestNeil J. Kressel, Psychology, William Paterson University, Wayne, NJRichard Landes, Department of History, Boston UniversityWalter Laqueur, Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University, Washington, DCKenneth Lasson, Law, University of BaltimoreMarcia Littell, Holocaust Studies, Richard Stockton College of NJJudith Bosker Liwerant, Political Science, UNAM, Mexico CityHubert G. Locke, University of Washington, SeattleDavid Matas, Hon Counsel-Bnai Brith Canada, WinnipegJoanna B. Michlic, HBI, Brandeis University, Waltham, MAFiamma Nirenstein, Italian Chamber of Deputies, RomeAndre Oboler, Global Forum to Combat Antisemitism, MelbourneDarren O’Brien, Australian Holocaust and Genocide Studies, SydneyAndrei Oisteanu, Institute History of Religions, BucharestJohn Pawlikowski, Catholic Theological Union, ChicagoWinston Pickett, Communications, Brighton, UKDaniel Pipes, Middle East Forum, PhiladelphiaDina Porat, Stephen Roth Institute, Tel Aviv UniversityLars Rensmann, Political Science, University of MichiganPaul Lawrence Rose, European History and Jewish Studies, Pennsylvania State UniversityRichard L. Rubenstein, President Emeritus, University of BridgeportFrederick Schweitzer, Manhattan College, NYCMilton Shain, History, University of Cape Town, South AfricaMarc I. Sherman, Index/Bibliography, JerusalemMarcia Sokolowski, Baycrest Hospital, University of TorontoPhilip J. Spencer, Helen Bamber Center, Kingston University, UKPierre-Andre Taguieff, CNRS (Sciences Po), ParisDiana Siegel Vann, American Jewish Committee, Washington, DCSue Vice, English Literature, University of Sheffield, UKJames E. Waller, Cohen Chair, Keene State College, NHShalva Weil, Hebrew University of JerusalemRobert Wistrich, Sassoon Center/SICSA Hebrew University of JerusalemBat Ye’or, Independent Scholar, Switzerland

JSA Submission Guidelines

The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism (JSA) is the peer-reviewed workof a select group of independent scholars who examine antisemitism intraditional and emerging forms. This group is not affiliated with anyinstitution or financially dependent on a single source of funding. We havein common an understanding of antisemitism as a social pathology thatmust be eradicated. We are an educationally based concern. E-mailsubmissions should be original, either on hard copy or an electronic copy inMS Word format. Citations should be in Chicago Manual of Style format.Send submissions and questions to the editors of the JSA via mail,telephone, or e-mail.

Mailing address: Editors, JSAP.O. Box 726 Marlboro, NJ 08053 Ph (856) 983-3247

Electronic journal submissions: [email protected] book reviews: c/o Book Review Editor:

[email protected].

The ideas represented in the JSA are those of the contributing authors, andnot reflective of the JSA, its board members, or the author’s institution. TheJSA welcomes unsolicited manuscripts.

Executive CommitteeJeffrey DiamondSimon FirerPhilip KirschnerJohn NettletonJoan Levy RosenbergLeon RosenbergNeal Howard RosenbergArnold Staloff

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Volume 3 Number 2

Special Issue:Campus Antisemitism . . . . . . . . . . . Guest Editor: Kenneth L. Marcus 321

From the Editors: The Year in Hate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven K. Baum 325and Neal E. Rosenberg

Antisemitic Incidents from Around the World:July–December 2011 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Editors 333

ArticlesIn an Academic Voice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kenneth Lasson 349

Antisemitism and the Campus Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Cravatts 407

Antisemitism at the University of California . . . . . . . Leila Beckwith 443

On Whiteness and the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Linda Maizels 463

Holocaust Envy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriel N. Brahm Jr. 489

Of Scientific NoteMental Models of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict . . . Wilhelm Kempf 507

Resentment Reloaded . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lars Rensmann 543

EssaysOperation Mural and Morocco’s Jewish Children . . . . David Littman 575

Jerusalem or Al-Quds? The EU’s Choice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bat Ye’or 581

Conspiracy, N’est-ce Pas? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Hadassa Ben-Itto 597

What Happened to Pakistan’s Jews? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Shalva Weil 603

Remembrance of Warwick Days. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Smadar Bakovic 607

Die Linke and The Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sebastian Voigt 611

What My Daughter’s Friend andAmbassador Gutman Need to Know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Landes 623

Antisemitism and the Dutch Soccer Fields . . . . Manfred Gerstenfeld 629

Was Cesare Lombroso Antisemitic? . . . . . . . . . . . . Gabriel Cavaglion 647

Jews in Afghan Eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mark Silinsky 667

“Saint” Chesterton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Simon Mayers 683

Nicholas Kristof, Israel, and Double Standards . . . Jeffrey Grossman 689

The CST: A Vital Partnership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Whine 695

Economic Crisis and Blaming You Know Who . . . . Karin Stoegner 711

The Inane Politics of Tony Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Camila Bassi 729

Sayeeda Warsi: A Trifle Confused . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Melanie Phillips 739

Captain Basto, the Portuguese Dreyfus . . . . . . . Isabel Ferreira Lopes 743

Last Week, They Defaced My Temple . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barbara Silver 745

ReviewsMarcus’s Jewish Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lesley Klaff 747

Gilbert’s In Ishmael’s House . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Stephen Riley 759

Jacobson’s The Finkler Question . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sue Vice 767

Herman’s An Unfortunate Coincidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . David Fraser 771

O’Brien’s Pinnacle of Hatred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Anthony Bale 781

Pollack’s Antisemitism on the Campus . . . . . . . . . . . Richard Cravatts 785

Livak’s The Jewish Persona in theEuropean Imagination . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Harriet Murav 791

Rensmann and Schoeps’sPolitics and Resentment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven K. Baum 797

Sacks’s The Great Partnership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Steven L. Jacobs 801

Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust . . . . . . . . . . Matthias Kuntzel 805and Colin Meade

Colon’s Rasputin and the Jews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Israel Drazin 821

The Debt, Sarah’s Key, Unmasked . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Joanne Intrator 823and Scott Rose

Shamir’s Defamation: A Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nathan Abrams 833

Antisemitica . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 837

In America, Jews feel very comfortable,

but there are islands of antisemitism:

the American college campus.

—Natan Sharansky

Introduction: Special Issue onCampus Antisemitism

Kenneth L. Marcus1

The present is an especially appropriate time to dedicate a specialCampus Antisemitism issue of this journal to the memory of my late col-league and friend, Dr. Gary A. Tobin. Tobin was one of the first to see, andamong the most stalwart to fight, the resurgence of antisemitism in Ameri-can educational systems. His last and most passionate contributions tosocial science were landmark volumes on antisemitism in higher education(The Uncivil University) and in American textbooks (The Trouble withTextbooks). Two years after his premature passing, Tobin’s Institute forJewish & Community Research (IJCR) is issuing another sobering report onthe state of antisemitism in academia.2

As editors Steven Baum and Neal Rosenberg report, the IJCR’s newpoll of U.S. students reveals that over 40 percent of Jewish American col-lege students—more than two in five—have experienced or witnessedantisemitic incidents on their campus.3 This is a sobering figure in light ofcommon perceptions that the last few years have marked a “golden age” forJewish students in post-secondary education. The situation is even moredisturbing when one drills deeper into the IJCR’s new data. First, most non-Jewish students appear to be entirely oblivious or insensitive to the chal-lenges facing their Jewish classmates. According to the IJCR study, barelyone in 10 non-Jewish college students say that they have witnessedantisemitism around them. This is 75 percent less than the figure for theJewish students. For this reason, the IJCR’s Aryeh Weinberg has entitledthe new study “Alone on the Campus,” as non-Jewish students either don’tsee or don’t understand or don’t care about what is going on around them.

Second, Jewish students are not being overly sensitive. If anything,they seem to significantly underreport bias incidents directed against Jews.The 40 percent figure may sound high until one sees that even higher per-centages of Jewish students answer affirmatively when asked more specifi-cally about antisemitic incidents. For example, when Jewish college

1. The author acknowledges Dorothy Tananbaum for her thoughts and supportin preparing this introduction.

2. This author succeeded Tobin as director of The Anti-Semitism Initiative atIJCR.

3. Aryeh Weinberg, Alone on the Quad: Understanding Jewish Student Isola-tion on Campus (San Francisco: Institute for Jewish & Community Research,2011).

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students are specifically asked whether they have heard derogatory remarksleveled against Jews on their campus, more than half answer affirmatively.This is roughly 25 percent higher than the number who answer affirma-tively to the more general question about antisemitic incidents.

Paradoxically, the figures are even higher when the questions get morespecific, although they should be lower (since the general encompasses thespecific). For example, nearly two thirds of Jewish college students haveheard people on their campus specifically berating Jews for being “greedy.”In other words, Jewish students are if anything reluctant to characterizecampus conduct as antisemitic unless they are questioned very specifically.There may be good reason for this; they likely are aware, as the datademonstrate, that so many of their non-Jewish classmates are largely indif-ferent, oblivious, or uncaring about what they are facing.

Given this data, it is important to understand exactly what is going onin American higher education and why. These are the questions to whichthis special issue of JSA is dedicated. By way of context, it is important toemphasize that the level of antisemitism in American higher educationdeclined steadily and dramatically from the end of the Second World Waruntil the turn of the new century. Institutional antisemitism, such as quotason students or faculty, has long since been eliminated. Most of today’s Jew-ish college students enjoy opportunities of which their grandparents couldnot have dreamed. Moreover, aggregate faculty attitudes toward Jewish stu-dents are quite favorable compared to virtually any other group. Most Jew-ish American college students will witness little or no antisemitism, otherthan perhaps a passing remark or inappropriate joke or fleeting insult. Nev-ertheless, it is increasingly clear that the long steady progress against thisold hate has stalled if not reversed, and there are pockets of academe withinwhich rather severe incidents are now reported. Thus, it is important tounderstand the nature of the old-new bigotry that is arising again.

In these pages, Kenneth Lasson and Richard Cravatts provide compre-hensive and detailed presentations of the state of antisemitism in Americanacademe; Leila Beckwith focuses more intensively on the situation on Cali-fornia campuses; while Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr. and Linda Maizels assesssome of the reasons for this troubling phenomenon. At the University ofCalifornia, Beckwith reports, “Jewish students have been subjected to: actsof physical aggression; intimidation; swastikas; speakers, films, and exhib-its that use antisemitic imagery and discourse; speakers that praise andencourage support for terrorist organizations; the organized disruption ofevents that Jewish student groups had sponsored; and the promotion of stu-dent resolutions for divestment from Israel that demonize and delegitimizethe Jewish State.” Lasson, similarly, argues from the East Coast that “Jew-ish and pro-Israel students across the country are patronized, mocked,

2011]INTRODUCTION: SPECIAL ISSUE ON CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM 323

intimidated, and sometimes physically attacked. . . .” Cravatts points to anintensifying campus “war against Israel” and argues that “derision of Zion-ism and the denunciation of Israel have become a convenient way forantisemites to mask their true prejudice against Jews by claiming that theirproblem is only with the policies of Israel, not with Jews themselves.”

Since the name of Marx appears prominently, if rather unsympatheti-cally, in these pages (at least in Lasson’s and Cravatts’ analyses), it is worthobserving in Marxian terms that the ultimate goal of this exercise is not tounderstand this world but to change it. This issue describes quite a numberof potential avenues for combating the problems that it describes. Lassoncautions, wisely enough, against the long-term dangers of university actionsthat could be perceived as censoring constitutionally protected speech. Atthe same time, there are many ways of addressing campus incidents whilefully protecting freedom of speech. For example, Beckwith describes how700 University of California students signed a petition expressing outrage atthe climate toward Jewish students on their campuses and demandingchange. She also describes letter-writing campaigns and urges universityadministrators to use their discretion to specifically condemn antisemiticincidents. Such approaches are both commendable and impressive, butBeckwith, Cravatts, and Lasson all concede that legal measures, consistentwith the freedom of speech and doctrine of academic freedom, may also berequired. Indeed, all three authors describe the use of lawsuits and federalinvestigations to redress extreme hostile environments against Jewish stu-dents—a topic not unknown to readers of this journal.4

The question of legal action brings several thoughts to mind. Manypeople, even within the Jewish community, are reluctant to introduce suchpowerful methods into the university context. This caution is appropriateenough. Whenever it is feasible, and where applicable statutory limitationsperiods permit, non-legal approaches should be tried first. There are times,however, when no other approach will suffice. Even in higher education, itis now universally acknowledged that basic civil rights would not have beenextended to African-American students across large swaths of the UnitedStates absent the forceful use of legal means. For black students in theSouth, many years of patient, forceful efforts were required to achieve ulti-mate victory. For Jewish students on some campuses, similar efforts will berequired. There are some who fear now, as others feared then, that strenu-ous civil rights efforts will provoke resentment or backlash. There are notfrivolous concerns. It is prudent to craft strategies that will minimize theserisks. At the same time, those who take a long view of this old hate will

4. See Kenneth L. Marcus, “The New OCR Anti-Semitism Policy,” Journalfor the Study of Antisemitism 2 (2011): 479.


observe that the timid have too often stayed the hand of justice when thetime for action had come. The portrait that emerges from the studiespresented in this issue, together with the data newly released by IJCR, rein-forces the need for serious and deliberate response, up to and including thejudicious use of legal action.5

5. Appropriately enough, the next issue of this journal will be devoted to law.

A Note from the Editors: The Year in Hate

Natan Sharansky almost had it right when he made the statement in2006 that an island of antisemitism exists on the American campus. Hecould have never predicted that anti-Zionist–based antisemitism would popup on colleges campuses in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Capetown, Madrid,Manchester, Mexico City, Paris, Sydney, and Toronto as well—nor couldhe have predicted a time when to be Israeli would be the new prejudice. Justask Smadar Bakovic, an Israeli graduate student at Warwick University.Bakovic had to fight for a year so her doctoral dissertation—initiallyrejected by an anti-Zionist professor—would finally be deemed acceptable.“I am sure that had I been gay or black and Professor Pratt were to signpetitions to boycott all gays and/or blacks, Warwick would have kicked herout a long time ago,” Bakovic stated in a recent interview. But in the cur-rent pro-Palestinian British culture—where all things Israeli are evil—ananti-Zionist professor had thwarted Bakovic from obtaining her doctoraldegree based on nothing more than anti-Zionist politics. Her story appearsin this issue.

Anti-Zionist politics seems to dominate campus life, and segue quicklyinto generic antisemitism. This issue of the JSA is dedicated to understand-ing how it happens. We are proud to announce that the issue, which marks amilestone in JSA scholarship, has been edited by an expert in law and cam-pus antisemitism, Kenneth L. Marcus (Jewish Identity and Civil Rights inAmerica, Cambridge University, 2010). We are also proud that almost halfthe essays are written by Israeli Jews—those very same people from acountry that annual BBC polls report is among the most disliked nations,even though their rank scores also consistently place them among the leastcorrupt (http://cpi.transparency.org/cpi2011/) and most generous nations(http://www.cafamerica.org/dnn/). Israeli Jews, in sixty-three years of thecountry’s existence, have produced more Nobel laureates than Spain or allMuslim nations combined. Yet, the “evil Israelis,” who despite Arab Springcontinue as the only democracy in the Middle East, are subject to extremecriticism.1 In balanced reporting of the Middle East, reasonable peoplewould be thinking of Israel as democratic, generous, least corrupt, and withthe most advancements in medicine and the sciences—and asking what are

1. Since Israel’s birth in 1948, the death tolls of Arabs (7,900) and Israeli Jews(1,500) receives daily news coverage. Contrast this against the dramatic absence inthe scrutiny of Assad’s killing of 5,000 Syrians from March to December 2011,Jordan’s killing of several thousand Palestinians in the 1970 Black Septemberuprising, Algeria’s killing of 100,000 mainstream Muslims, and Sudan’s killing of400,000 non-Muslims.

325


they doing right? Instead, public opinion is busy pointing out everythingIsraeli as wrong. Influenced by Arab propaganda, a naive news media, andthe Church, the image of Israelis (Jews) killing innocents becomes quicklyaccepted—accompanied, of course, by the time-honored solution: Israel/Jews must be contained, killed, or expelled from the social body. Below arepublic statements of the past year, collected by the Simon WiesenthalCenter, that reflect what’s on the public’s mind:

• “Not all the Jews in the world are evil . . . the ratio is 60-40. Sixtypercent are evil”—Tawfig Okasha, presidential candidate, Egypt.

• “I love Hitler . . . People like you would be dead. Your mothers,your forefathers, would all be fucking gassed”—John Galliano,designer, Dior.

• “I am very much for Jews. No, not too much, because Israel is apain in the ass . . . I’m very much for Speer. Albert Speer . . . Hewas also maybe one of God’s best children . . . I’m a Nazi”—LarsVon Trier, film director.

• “Everything that happens today in the world has to do with theZionists . . . American Jews are behind the world economic crisisthat has hit Greece also”—Mikis Theodorakis, composer of thescore for the film Zorba the Greek.

• “The source that finances and incites all these international organi-zations . . . especially in the Arab world . . . are led by a single, evilorganization, known as Zionism. It is behind all these movements,all these civil wars, and all these evils . . . Jesus Christ healed thesick among the Jews . . . and resurrected their dead. [How did theyrepay him?] “They strived to crucify him until he died . . .”—George Saliba, bishop of the Syriac Orthodox Church in Lebanon.

• “Oppose the moral blackmail of the so-called Holocaust!”—Her-mann Dierkes, Die Linke (The Left Party), Germany.

• “The state of Israel is an illegal, genocidal place . . .”—Rev. Jere-miah Wright, speech in Baltimore.

But anti-Israeli opinion does not only extend to public statements inthe press. In the past year, such tropes infuse antisemitic sentiment as well,as shown in several surveys done in 2011. Below are the results of thesesurveys.

2011] A NOTE FROM THE EDITORS 327

• In an Institute for Jewish and Community Research poll of 1,400U.S students, 41% of Jewish students report hearing anti-Israeliremarks in the classroom, and about the same confirm antisemitismon their campuses as normalized and underreported. A breakdownof the rhetoric appears in the graph above.

• A National Jewish Students survey finds 42% of UK collegerespondents experiencing an antisemitic incident since the begin-ning of the academic year, but only two in 10 say they were con-cerned about campus antisemitism.

• A CST report shows 427 antisemitic attacks in 57 countriesbetween 1968-2010. France had the highest number of attacks (51),followed by the United States (34), Italy (33), Argentina and Ger-many (29), and the UK (28).

• An Argentina survey revealed that 82% of the respondents thoughtthat the main interest of the Jews is to make money. The same poll,conducted by the Gino Germani Institute of the University of Bue-nos Aires, found that 45% of those polled “would never marry aJew” and that 30% “would not live in a neighborhood with a largepresence of Jews.”

• According to the Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Con-temporanea (CDEC) (Center of Contemporary Jewish Documenta-tion) and the Institute for Social and Political Opinion Research(ISPO), one in three Italians considers Jews “not very nice” and44% declare that they feel no sympathy toward Jews. Fifteen per-cent of antisemites base their attitude on what they think they knowabout Jews.

• A German study found that almost half (47.7%) of Germans acceptthe notion that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination againstthe Palestinians.”


• An Australian study lists a record 517 attacks, 38% above the aver-age of the previous two decades.

• A Jerusalem survey finds that only one in three Palestinians (34%)accepts a two-state-for-two-people solution to the Israeli-Palestin-ian conflict.

• Fifty-two percent of Spanish students declared that they would notlike to have a Jewish classmate sitting next to them, and 58% ofadults thought that Jews have too much power and that they are alltoo rich, according to a poll presented at Madrid’s Fourth Interna-tional Seminar on Antisemitism.

• A November 2011 poll by Andras Kovacs notes the number ofHungarians who find Jews repugnant (24%) had significantlyincreased prior to the election years, a fact indicating that politicalendeavors augment anti-Jewish sentiment—namely, the “JewishQuestion.”

There were still other survey findings, which afford additional insights.Sweden reported a record high of 161 antisemitic hate crimes in the pastyear. A German report recorded that 20% of the population holds stronglyantisemitic views (the percentage in most democratic nations, though Hol-land is the lowest and Spain, Eastern Europe, and Russia the highest); theADL-USA reports findings of approximately 1,200+ antisemitic incidents.This is one of the lowest in the past decade, but offset by annual antisemiticincidents everywhere else that are at record highs—Germany (1,520 inci-dents) and Canada (1,306 incidents) have the dubious honor of topping theannual list again, most of the perpetrators being young, male, and right-wing Muslim.

But it is not only angry, authoritarian, young male Muslims who aremaking the surveys. An April 2011 study by lead author Andreas Zick atGermany’s University of Beilefeld, titled “Intolerance, Prejudice and Dis-crimination,” www.uni-bielefeld.de/ikg/zick/ZicketalGFEengl.pdf, sur-veyed by phone approximately 1,000 people in eight European nations. Thefindings revealed that nearly 50% of Germans believe that “Jews try to takeadvantage of having been victims of the Nazi era.” As cited earlier, almosthalf believe that Israel is conducting an all-out war to exterminate Palestini-ans, while a third (35%) agree with this statement: “Considering Israel’spolicy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”

Whether it is the mainstream news media’s influence. as RichardLandes’ essay in this issue suggests, the political left’s influence, or bothremains uncertain. According to German sociologist Samuel Salzborn, “Thepattern is always the same: ostensibly it is couched as criticism of Israel,but the arguments reveal themselves as antisemitic to the core.”


So this issue on campus antisemitism could not have come at a bettertime, as campuses continue to send the message throughout the world that ifIsrael would disappear, Jihad would go away.

If you are Lars Rensmann, you focus on popular culture’s underlyingresentment of Jews as the major cause of antisemitism. His examination ofenvy and acrimony is backed by evidence in several nations to fortify hisposition. The statistics of social scientist Wilhelm Kempf echo AndreasZick’s findings that anger at the Israelis vis-a-vis the Palestinian conflict isstirring up a hornet’s nest. Yet if you are Richard Landes, you’ll have noneof this. Landes makes a brilliant case for the mainstream media machine’spromoting the Arab position on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. SebastianVoigt and Jeffrey Grossman similarly point out how you are what you read,and invariably those reading the statements of Die Linke or articles in TheNew York Times will soon hate Israel as well.

Middle East politics never take a holiday. Melanie Phillips is quick topoint out how UK politicians like Sayeeda Warsi have much to say but thatlittle of it holds up to any kind of scrutiny. Unfortunately, Warsi is not anisolated case. Earlier this year, Baroness Tonge was told to step down forher “Israeli organ harvesting” comments. Then, of course, there are theyear’s apologies. British MEP Sir Robert Atkins apologized for suggestingthat British Jews are pressuring Israel to stop the Palestinian conflict; MPPaul Flynn apologized for questioning if there are dual loyalties of Britain’sfirst Jewish ambassador to Israel; then there was the Conservative MP whohosted a Nazi party, later apologized, and got sacked; and so on.

Not to be undone, some Israeli Jews got into the act, such as Britishjazz musician Gilad Atzmon, author of The Wandering Who? (http://youtu.be/BFjejrGxFY4). The book’s theme of an insider’s look at the “Jew-ish (and Israeli) problem” received immediate endorsements from Britishjournalist Alan Hart, renowned anti-Zionist professors Richard Falk and


John Mearsheimer, a litany of pro-Palestinians, and eventually U.S. presi-dential candidate Ron Paul.

Hadassa Ben-Itto notes that the refrain sounds oddly familiar in her re-examination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Along these lines isCamila Bassi’s expose of Israeli Tony Cliff and Gabriel Cavaglion’s indict-ment of Cesare Lombroso. It makes traditional antisemites like G. K. Ches-terton, as rendered by Simon Mayers, pale by comparison.

There is a history of anti-Zionist–based antisemitism, but none GiladAtzmon wants to remember. David Littman recalls that it was not so longago that Mossad asked him to help rescue Jewish children in Morocco aspart of Operation Mural—and without any training, he did. His wife, BatYe’or, reminds us that same could occur again globally and challenges theEuropean Union to pay attention to the Al-Qud factor. The same year DavidLittman was rescuing Jewish children—1961—Isabel Lopes’ grandfather(Captain Autur Barros Basto) died. Captain Basto, who had been given adishonorable discharge from the Portuguese army, died in shame. In March2012, Lopes will petition the Portuguese Parliament to exonerate her grand-father and clear his name from the crime of being “too Jewish in fascistPortugal”; see http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/pardon-Capt-Barros-Basto/.

Manfred Gerstenfeld’s essay asks us to pay more attention to theantisemitism inherent in sports in general and the soccer fields in particular,while Mark Silinksy points up how the same hate readily transfers to ThirdWorld Afghanistan or, as Karin Stoegner observes, travels to the modernnation state of Austria. Barbara Silver focuses on the inevitable conse-quence of all such hate as she copes with her temple’s defacement in themiddle of Canada. What is the answer? No one is quite certain, but ShalvaWeil knows some inevitable consequences as she documents the demise ofPakistan’s Jewish community. Michael Whine makes the case for organiza-tions, such as the British CST, monitoring hate groups and continuing theirmission to help Jews when the need arises. The need seems to always arise.

We have books and films to help us feel less alone in the world and toadvance our understanding of our uncertain environment. There are NathanAbrams’ analysis of the off-beat film Defamation and Joanne Intrator andScott Rose’s informed reviews of the films The Debt, Sarah’s Key, andUnmasked. Also included are Sue Vice’s review of Howard Jacobson’snovel The Finkler Question, as well as reviews of good solid books oncampus antisemitism, such as Lesley Klaff on Jewish Identity by KennethMarcus, this issue’s guest editor; Richard Cravatts on Eunice Pollack’sAntisemitism on the Campus; and Stephen Riley’s account of Martin Gil-bert’s In Ishmael’s House. There are Matthias Kuntzel and Colin Meade’sincisive indictment of Arab politics in Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and theHolocaust; British law professor David Fraser analyzing Didi Herman’s An


Unfortunate Coincidence; and Anthony Bale on the blood libels describedin Darren O’Brien’s Pinnacle of Hatred. Steven Baum reviews the empiri-cally based Politics of Resentment, edited by Lars Rensmann and JuliusSchoeps, and Rabbi Steven L. Jacobs reviews chief rabbi Lord JonathanSacks’ The Great Partnership. Finally, we have Israel Drazin’s review ofRasputin and the Jews by Rasputin’s great-granddaughter Delin Colon.

We look forward to our fourth year in 2012, with special issues in law(guest editor, Kenneth Lasson) and Eastern European antisemitism (guesteditor, Andras Kovacs). Thanks and deep appreciation go to our sponsors:the Jewish Community Foundation and the New Mexico and Texas lawfirm of Jeff Diamond; to all our contributors and reviewers; to our associateeditors, Florette Cohen, Steven L. Jacobs, Lesley Klaff, and Kenneth Mar-cus; to our chair, Shimon T. Samuels; and particularly to our readers, whocontinue to make this journal a success. The next year promises to be bothchallenging and fulfilling as the JSA continues its mission to documentantisemitism in all its poisonous forms and search for antidotes.

Steven K. Baum and Neal E. Rosenberg, Editors

Special thanks to:

In Loving Memory of our FatherNorman Diamond WWII Veteran 1924–2011

–Jeff and Connie Diamond


JSA BEST AWARDS

The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism is pleased to announce thefollowing recipients of JSA’s Best Awards for 2011:

BEST BOOKLars Rensmann and Julius Schoeps’s Politics and Resentment, Brill (Best

Book, Academic)Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, Bloomsbury (Best Book,

Fiction)Bat Ye’or’s Europe, Globalization and the Coming Universal Caliphate

Farleigh Dickinson University Press(Best Book, Israeli-Arab Conflict)

Didi Herman’s An Unfortunate Coincidence, Oxford University Press(Best Book, Law)

Honorable Mention Robert Michael’s A History of Catholic Antisemitism,Palgrave Macmillan

BEST ORIGINAL ARTICLEModels of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Wilhelm KempfMexico in a Region of Change, Judit Bokser Liwerant

BEST ESSAYAntisemitism and the Dutch Soccer Fields, Manfred GerstenfeldWhat My Daughter’s Friend and Ambassador Gutman Need to Know,

Richard Landes

BEST BOOK/FILM REVIEWGilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust, Matthias Kuntzel and

Colin MeadeMartin Gilbert’s In Ishmael’s House, Stephen RileyKenneth L. Marcus’s Jewish Identity and Civil Rights, Lesley KlaffThe Debt, Sarah’s Key, Unmasked, Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose

Antisemitic Incidents from Around the World—A Partial List

July–December 2011

JULYToronto, July 4: Aurora’s Abbotsford Animal Hospital, on Yonge Street,was the target of antisemitic vandalism. The vet’s office was littered withseveral Nazi symbols and antisemitic graffiti, and rocks had been thrownthrough windows at the clinic. “I never experienced something like this,”said veterinarian Jory Bocknek, who is Jewish. “The first thing I thoughtwas I didn’t want my kids to see it. I’m very disappointed.”

Las Vegas, July 6: Gravestones in Montefiore Cemetery became the latestmonuments to be vandalized at this historic burial ground on the northwest-ern edge of the city. Although one local man thinks the incident was anantisemitic attack, the local police chief and the cemetery’s caretakerbelieve the vandalism, involving several knocked-down and broken gravemarkers, was an indiscriminate act. The cemetery, named for the BritishJewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore, was established in 1881 on landthat originally was part of the adjoining Masonic Cemetery. Today, it has80 to 90 graves.

London, July 10: Baroness Tonge, a Liberal Democrat frontbencher, hasbeen sacked after calling for an inquiry into allegations that Israeli soldierssupporting the relief effort in Haiti had been involved in organ-trafficking.

New York, July 10: The Anti-Defamation League has called on the UnitedNations human rights chief to publicly condemn Richard Falk, the UN spe-cial rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, for posting anantisemitic cartoon on his personal blog. The cartoon depicted the UnitedStates as a vicious dog wearing a skullcap, urinating on what is meant to beLady Justice while feasting on a pile of blood and bones.

Jerusalem, July 12: The Simon Wiesenthal Center strongly criticized theLithuanian government for trying to hide or minimize the highly significantrole of local Nazi collaborators in Holocaust crimes and attributed the dese-cration of the memorial at Ponar, the site of the mass murder of 70,000Jews during the Holocaust, to the falsification of World War II history bylocal historians with governmental sponsorship and support.

333


Jerusalem, July 15: Only one in three Palestinians accepts two states for twopeoples as the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to anintensive, face-to-face survey in Arabic of 1,010 Palestinian adults in theWest Bank and the Gaza Strip completed this week by American pollsterStanley Greenberg. Respondents were asked about U.S. president BarackObama’s statement that “There should be two states: Palestine as the home-land for the Palestinian people and Israel as the homeland for the Jewishpeople.” Just 34% said they accepted that concept, while 61% rejected it.Sixty-six percent said the Palestinians’ real goal should be to start with atwo-state solution but then move to one Palestinian state. Asked about thefate of Jerusalem, 92% said it should be the capital of Palestine, 1% said thecapital of Israel, 3% the capital of both, and 4% a neutral international city.Seventy-two percent backed denying the thousands of years of Jewish his-tory in Jerusalem, 62% supported kidnapping IDF soldiers and holdingthem hostage, and 53% were in favor or teaching songs about hating Jewsin Palestinian schools. When given a quote from the Hamas Charter aboutthe need for battalions from the Arab and Islamic world to defeat the Jews,80% agreed. Seventy-three percent agreed with a quote from the charter(and a hadith, or tradition ascribed to the prophet Muhammad) about theneed to kill Jews hiding behind stones and trees.

Budapest, July 18: Hungarian war-crimes suspect Sandor Kepiro was foundnot guilty by the Buda District Court. He had been charged with complicityin the Novi Sad massacre of January 1942 in northern Serbia, in which asmany as 1,250 Jews, Serbs, and Roma were murdered, and with directresponsibility for the death of 36 people.

Budapest, July 25: Hungary’s new media law, which went into effect onJuly 1, carries a distinctly unpleasant whiff of the country’s fascist andcommunist past. Under its provisions, all media outlets are required to reg-ister with a body called the Media Council. The council is empowered toimpose fines of nearly $1 million upon those publications and broadcastersdeemed to have “insulted” a particular group, along with an amorphousentity defined as “the majority.” In another case, by contrast, reader com-ments on an article in the pro-government newspaper Magyar Hirlap wereriddled with antisemitic slurs of jaw-dropping foulness, yet not a peep hasbeen heard from the Media Council. The Magyar Hirlap article reported onan opinion piece by Karl Pfeifer, the veteran Austrian Jewish journalist, inthe Vienna daily Die Presse. In that piece, Pfeifer relayed the contents of anarticle by Zsolt Bayer, a Hungarian rabble-rouser with close ties to the rul-ing Fidesz party who passes himself off as a journalist. Bayer’s style mir-rors the screeching, obscene rants of Julius Streicher, the editor of the Nazi

2011] ANTISEMITIC INCIDENTS JULY–DECEMBER 2011 335

rag Der Sturmer. His rambling tirade included a reference to “a stinkingexcrement called something like Cohen,” followed by an expression ofregret that “they”—meaning the Jews—“were not all buried up to theirnecks in the forest of Orgovany,” the site of a pogrom during the HungarianWhite Terror of 1919-20.

Kuala Lumpur, July 28: The Chelsea football club has made an officialcomplaint following what it describes as antisemitic abuse directed atIsraeli player Yossi Benayoun at a match where he helped Chelsea beatMalaysian XI. The Israeli became the first footballer from the Jewish stateto play in a match in Malaysia in many years; Israelis Tal Ben Haim andAvram Grant were denied visas to enter the Muslim-majority country formatches in recent years. But despite being allowed to play, things did not gosmoothly for Benayoun. Instead, many in the 85,000-strong crowd jeeredand booed him when he came in contact with the ball, and he was substi-tuted at halftime.

Little Rock, AK, July 29: In a letter to the FBI, obtained by The AssociatedPress under a Freedom of Information Act request, Abdulhakim Muham-mad said he fired 10 rounds at the home of Rabbi Eugene Levy days beforehe fatally shot Pvt. William Andrew Long and wounded Pvt. QuintonEzeagwula in June 2009. A judge sentenced Muhammad to life in prisonwithout parole this week after prosecutors accepted his plea agreement dur-ing his capital murder trial for killing Long and hurting Ezeagwula. In theletter, dated November 24, 2009, Muhammad said he targeted Levy’s houseafter researching Jewish leaders in Little Rock, Nashville, Tenn., and hishometown of Memphis, where he was born with the name Carlos Bledsoe.He changed his name after converting to Islam in college. “Figured the FBIwasn’t watching me anymore,” he wrote. “I started my Plans to Attack,recruitment centers, Jewish organizations, across America . . .”

London, July 30: The Community Security Trust, a Jewish charity based inGreat Britain, released a new report entitled “Terrorist Incidents againstJewish Communities and Israeli Citizens abroad 1968-2010.” The reportindicates that between 1968 and 2010, 427 attacks have occurred in 57countries. France had the highest number of attacks (51), followed by theUnited States (34), Italy (33), Argentina and Germany (29 each), and theUnited Kingdom (28).

AUGUSTDublin, August 1: During a church sermon, Fr. Eddie Conway describedAlan Shatter, the minister of justice, as a non-practicing Jew who has used


the recent child sex abuse scandal to specifically target the church. Severalmass goers walked out in response to his comments.

Budapest, August 5: Anti-government protests broke out following the gov-ernment’s announcement to abolish early retirement. While the protest waspredominantly composed of public service employees, several membersfrom two right-wing extremist groups also participated. Hungarian publictelevision reported that a white cloth with a Star of David was burned dur-ing the protest.

Prague, August 5: Despite calls from government officials and NGOs toremove Ladislav Batora from the Ministry of Education, Czech educationminister Josef Dobes insists that Batora is a “dutiful person, a patriot, and aconservative Roman Catholic.” He also insists that “there is no evidenceproving that Batora is a racist.” Batora has been accused of having connec-tions to racist and antisemitic organizations.

Toronto, August 5: A swastika and the words “Islam Will Rule” were founddrawn on a wall of a Jewish school, and two other swastikas were found ona nearby Korean-language church; details regarding a third incident are notavailable. Toronto and Canadian Jewish communities have condemned theincidents.

Paris, August 12: A fashion icon whose name has become shorthand fortimeless French chic, a shrewd businesswoman who overcame a childhoodof poverty to build a luxury supernova and . . . a Nazi spy? . . . CocoChanel: The Legend and the Life, by Justine Picardie, alleges that in 1940,Chanel was recruited into the Abwehr—her nom de guerre borrowed fromanother of her lovers, the Duke of Westminster. A year later, the book says,she traveled to Spain on a spy mission—on condition that the Nazis releaseher nephew from a military internment camp—and later went to Berlin onthe orders of a top SS general. Picardie suggests that Chanel’s allegedantisemitism pushed her to try to capitalize on laws allowing for the expro-priation of Jewish property to wrest control of the Chanel perfume linesfrom the Wertheimer brothers, a Jewish family who’d helped make herChanel No. 5 a worldwide bestseller.

Berlin, Aug 22: Vandals struck Weissensee Cemetery in the former EastBerlin, Europe’s largest Jewish cemetery, after damaging 16 gravesites andstealing 47 items from Weissensee, and Jewish leaders are asking areametal dealers to check for wrought-iron objects that might have been stolen


from the cemetery. According to the community, renovations on some ofthe tombs had been completed as recently as last April.

London, August 21: “It is time, Brothers and Sisters, for Al Quds to beliberated. For Islam and people of the world who wish to pray there to theone God. And we say here today to you, Israel, we see your crimes and weloathe your crimes. And to us your nation does not exist, because it is acriminal injustice against humanity. We want to see Lebanon, Jordan andEgypt go to the borders and stop this now. Liberate Al Quds! March to AlQuds!” These were the words spoken by Lauren Booth (Tony Blair’s half-sister-in-law) at the Al Quds Day terror rally organized by the IslamicHuman Rights Commission in Trafalgar Square. Placards (see above) thatread “Israel Your Days Are Numbered,” “Death to Israel,” “Down DownIsrael,” For World Peace Israel Must Be Destroyed,” “The World StoppedNazism, The World Must Stop Zionism,” and “We Are All Hizbollah” weredisplayed.

Fife, Scotland, August 23: Student Paul Donnachie, 19, put his hands downhis trousers, then rubbed them on a flag of Israel belonging to Jewish stu-dent Chanan Reitblat; Donnachie also accused Reitblat of being a terroristduring the incident at the residence halls in March. The case against his co-accused Samuel Colchester, 20, was found not proven. Donnachie has beenexpelled from St. Andrews and Colchester has been suspended for one year.Cupar’s Sheriff Court had earlier heard evidence from Reitblat, a chemistrystudent on a one-term exchange from the Jewish Yeshiva University in NewYork, who said he felt “violated and devastated” by the incident.

Ramallah, August 28: Issa Qaraqi, the Palestinian minister of detainees andex-detainees, accused Israel of harvesting parts from the bodies of deadPalestinian martyrs without the consent of their families. Qaraqi spoke dur-ing the national day of the Palestinian campaign to retrieve martyrs’ bodies.


“Israel is the major harvesting and trading centre in the world,” he claimed.Israel holds the remains of Palestinian martyrs “to conceal the crimes itcommitted against the martyrs’ bodies and to punish their families, Qaraqisaid. “Holding of the martyrs’ remains for many years casts doubts and[causes] accusations that Israel assassinated them after detention or har-vested their organs,” the minister said, adding that “Israel is holding theremains of 338 Arab and Palestinian fighters in the secret Israeli cemeteriesknown as the Cemeteries of Numbers.”

Toronto, August 28: The traditional rally marking Al-Quds Day was held atQueen’s Park in front of the parliament of Ontario. The rally was attendedby hundreds of people, and extreme anti-Israel speeches were heard. ZafarBangash, president of the Islamic Society of York Region, attacked theUnited States and Israel, and expressed his belief that Palestine will soon beliberated from the current “Jewish-Zionist regime.”

SEPTEMBER

Bialystock, Poland, September 2: Vandals destroyed a monument to victimsof a World War II pogrom against Jews in Poland, covering it with racistinscriptions and swastikas in green paint, police said. It was the latest in arecent series of racist and xenophobic acts of vandalism targeting the smallJewish and Muslim communities in eastern Poland as well as the tiny Lithu-anian minority.

Bialystock, Poland, September 5: Polish media report that hundreds of peo-ple are marching in to protest racist and antisemitic attacks in the area, but asmall group chanting nationalist slogans is trying to disturb the Sundaydemonstration; the PAP news agency says Bialystok mayor Tadeusz Trus-kolaski and lawmakers of the ruling Civic Platform party are leading theprotest march in downtown Bialystok. A monument to hundreds of Jewsburned alive by their Polish neighbors in Jedwabne village during WorldWar II was desecrated. Other recent attacks have targeted a synagogue in


the village of Orla, a Muslim center in Bialystok, and the Lithuanian minor-ity in the Punsk region.

Cairo, September 10: Three were killed and 1,049 were injured in clashesoutside the Israeli embassy late Friday and early Saturday, the health minis-try said. The Israeli ambassador, his family, and working staff left Cairoearly Saturday on an Israeli military plane as protesters who stormed intothe embassy were still clashing with the Egyptian police and military forcesin Giza. Egyptian commandos had entered the embassy building as it cameunder attack to escort six Israeli citizens to safety, the AFP reported. Onlyone Israeli diplomat stayed in Egypt to handle embassy affairs, an Israeliofficial told Reuters. Meanwhile, the Egyptian prime minister Essam Sharafcalled a cabinet crisis meeting. Hundreds of protesters converged on theembassy throughout the afternoon and into the evening, tearing down alarge graffiti-covered security wall outside the 21-story building that housesthe embassy. The wall was erected on a bridge that runs along the street onwhich the building is located; it was built following ongoing protestsagainst the killing of five Egyptian soldiers on the Sinai border last month.The police made no attempt to intervene as protesters were tearing downthe wall with sledgehammers and their bare hands.

New York, September 12: The sports network ESPN has removed fantasyleagues with antisemitic names from its Web site after the SimonWiesenthal Center pointed them out. The Jewish human rights organizationpraised the sports network for its quick response to the complaint, whichnoted offensive names that included “Jews Are Immoral” and “Jews AreTerrible.” Network spokesman Josh Krulewitz said that while ESPN hassystems in place to protect against inappropriate team and league names,“clearly, with millions of users and deceptive ways around the safeguards,we can never completely eliminate [these incidents].” Rabbi AbrahamCooper of the Wiesenthal Center said that ESPN responded in good faith toits concerns.

Washington, DC, September 13: According to the 13th annual State Depart-ment Report on International Religious Freedom, antisemitism can be foundin nearly every corner of the globe, and it is on the rise. “Trends includeincreases in the traditional anti-Semitic actions and accusations that haveplagued the world for millennia—including desecration of cemeteries, graf-fiti, and blood libel accusations—as well as Holocaust denial, revisionism,and glorification,” the report found; some of this increase in antisemitism ispart of the campaign to delegitimize and demonize Israel. The State Depart-ment is required to report regularly to Congress by the International Relig-


ious Freedom Act of 1998; this edition covers the last half of 2010. It found“spikes in anti-Semitic expressions” in private as well as official media—notably cartoons—in several countries, including Poland, Spain, Egypt,Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela.

Cairo, September 15: “While walking in the street someone pushed mefrom behind with such force that I nearly fell over. Turning around, I foundmyself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch me in the face.I stopped the attack by pointing out how shameful it was for a Muslim toassault a guest in his country, especially during Ramadan. Relieved that aseemingly random assault was over, I was appalled by the apology offeredby one of my assailants. ‘Sorry,’ he said contritely, offering his hand, ‘wethought you were a Jew.’ ” —BBC Cairo Correspondent Thomas Dinham.

London, September 15: The British government confirmed on Thursdaythat the UK will not take part in the UN-sponsored Durban III anti-racismconference on September 22. Foreign secretary William Hague said theoriginal Durban conference 10 years ago had been an ugly affair. “The con-ference, and the anti-Semitic atmosphere in which it was held, was a partic-ularly unpleasant and divisive chapter in the UN’s history. It is not an eventthat should be celebrated,” he said. “The British government remains fullycommitted to tackling all forms of racism, both domestically and interna-tionally, something recognized by the recent report of the UN Committeeon the Elimination of Racial Discrimination,” Hague said. “The UN is theright place to discuss these important issues, in a serious way that deliversgenuine progress. The UK continues our work with the UN to implementmany of the commitments from the 2001 World Conference AgainstRacism.” Ten of the UN’s 193 member nations have now joined Israel inpulling out of Durban III: the UK, Germany, the United States, Canada,Italy, Austria, Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands.

Edmonton, September 17: A giant swastika carved into the side of a hill inCastle Downs Park in Edmonton, Alberta, seems to reflect a larger trend ofantisemitic incidents and racism across Canada. The swastika was found bya park worker, who said he witnessed a group of young men carving theimage into the hill. John Reilly, a spokesperson for Racism Free Edmonton,says such incidents are “a disturbing consistent presence within our com-munities.” According to B’nai B’rith Canada’s annual Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents, there has been a fivefold increase in harassment and vio-lence against Jews in Canada in the past 10 years. More than 1,300 inci-dents were recorded in 2010—the highest in almost 30 years, with themajority occurring in Ontario and Quebec. The incidents include harass-


ment, stereotyping, discrimination, threats, violence, and vandalism involv-ing “crimes of messaging”—offensive graffiti that contain racial slurs orswastikas. The identity of the perpetrators is largely unknown because thecrimes are frequently anonymous, but the audit reported 97 cases where theperpetrator self-identified as being of Arab origin, followed by sevenblacks, three Chinese, and one German. Reilly says there are known whitesupremacist and neo-Nazi groups that are often the perpetrators ofantisemitic attacks, but in a survey of Jewish Canadians commissioned byB’nai B’rith, the greatest single concern among Jewish communities wasabout extremist Islamic organizations and dictatorships, not neo-Nazis orother sources. The audit also reported that social media and the Internetwere increasingly being used for spreading hate or for assembling groups toparticipate in anti-Jewish events.

OCTOBERNew York, October 4: Following a consistent trend over the last severalyears, the Anti-Defamation League Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents foundthat the number of antisemitic incidents increased slightly in 2010, to a totalof 1,239 incidents of assault, vandalism, and harassment, compared to 1,211incidents reported in 2009. It is the first increase reported by the ADL sincethe numbers hit a record high in 2004, when the United States experienced1,821 incidents of antisemitism. Since 2004, the total number of anti-Jewishincidents had declined incrementally each year.

Buenos Aires, October 6: Two reports that reveal the extent of antisemitismin Argentina were released by DAIA, the Jewish umbrella organization. Anopinion poll conducted by the Gino Germani Institute of the University ofBuenos Aires found that 45 percent of those polled “would never marry aJew” and that 30 percent “would not live in a neighborhood with a largepresence of Jews.” The poll also showed that four out of 10 respondentshave a negative opinion of “Jews being involved in politics” and five out of10 think that Jews talk too much about the Holocaust. Some 54 percent ofthose polled agreed that Jews “are the first ones to turn their backs on theneedy.” DAIA called the results of the poll “disturbing and alarming.” Thesurvey was commissioned by DAIA and the Anti-Defamation League,which interviewed more than 1,500 people from across the country.According to Nestor Cohen, lead investigator from the University of Bue-nos Aires, “Jews are perceived as powerful, not supportive, and not loyal toArgentina.” He added that in this case, “discrimination has more to do withan anti-Jewish and not an anti-Israeli feeling; it is not related to Israel’spolitical decisions.” Meanwhile, the Annual Report on Anti-Semitism inArgentina showed that in 2010, anti-Jewish expressions appeared in public


spaces, including graffiti with Nazi symbols, and there was a large increaseover previous years in digital and virtual antisemitism. Approximately 300antisemitic incidents are reported in the country every year.

London, ON, Canada, October 16: Huron University College (the Univer-sity of Western Ontario) announced the appointment of Ingrid Mattson, aprofessor at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and former president of theIslamic Society of North America, as the first London and Windsor Com-munity Chair in Islamic Studies at its Faculty of Theology. The move vali-dates widespread concern, by Canadian journalist Barbara Kay, that thesupport of several Islamist groups in funding the chair would lead to theappointment of a radical Islamist as the first holder.

Rome, October 17: The Committee for the Inquiry into Anti-Semitism,chaired by MP Fiamma Nirenstein, has presented its Final Report to thepublic in the prestigious Hall of the Presidency of the Italian Chamber ofDeputies, called “Sala della Lupa.” The report was unanimously approvedby all members of the committee, formed by 30 MPs from the Constitu-tional Affairs and Foreign Affairs committees. The hearings and the initia-tives that have accompanied the Committee works have been proceedingfor the last two years. “We have been attempting to understand the newaspects of this phenomenon, which is as aggressive and genocidal as italways was, but it is presently hiding itself by assuming new forms,” MPNirenstein explained. The work of the inquiry has brought up alarmingdata: 44% of the Italians declare that they do not feel any sympathy towardthe Jews; there is an exponential proliferation of antisemitic Web sites andsocial networks; and the level of hatred against the State of Israel passes thelimits of legitimate criticism and aims to destroy the Jews.

New York, October 19: The Republican National Committee attackedDemocrats for staying silent about “extreme antisemitic, anti-Israel com-ments” reported at the Occupy Wall Street protests. RNC communicationsdirector Sean Spicer blasted top Democrats for voicing their support for thedemonstrations, even as some of the protesters make “antisemitic, anti-Israel comments,” according to a memo first reported in Morning Score.

NOVEMBERLondon, November 1: The National Jewish Student Survey, conducted bythe London-based Institute for Jewish Policy Research, found that morethan four out of every 10 Jewish students at British universities reportedwitnessing or experiencing antisemitic incidents between October 2010 andthis March, but that only two in 10 said they were concerned about campus


antisemitism. Released in September, the survey also showed that respon-dents were generally comfortable with their religious identity, and relativelyunconcerned about antisemitism and anti-Israel activity on campus. Thesurvey is the first-ever study examining Jewish campus life in Britain. Itwas commissioned by the Pears Foundation and the Union of Jewish Stu-dents, the umbrella group that oversees Jewish societies at more than 100British universities—essentially the British equivalent of Hillel Houses inthe United States. See http://www.jpr.org.uk/downloads/NJSS_report%20final.pdf.

Oxford, UK, November 8: Four members of the Oxford University Con-servative Association have resigned over antisemitism and snobbery. Thefour senior members said they were quitting the association after memberssang a song with a Nazi theme during an evening meeting billed as “portand policy,” the Telegraph reported. The members reportedly sang a songthat begins with the line “Dashing through the Reich . . . killing lots ofkike.” Student members of the club are facing disciplinary action by theuniversity and the Conservative Party. Both have launched investigationsinto the incident, according to the newspaper. Two prime ministers and 13cabinet ministers are among the club’s alumni. The club has faced accusa-tions of racism in the past. In 2000, four members were expelled for makingNazi salutes.

Brooklyn, November 11: Three cars were torched and antisemitic graffitiwas spray-painted at the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Midwood.Residents were awakened early by fire engines and were horrified to findthree vehicles that were parked on Ocean Parkway—a BMW, a Jaguar. andan Audi—burnt to a crisp. Swastikas, references to the SS and the KKK,and the slogan “F— the Jews” were daubed on nearby vehicles, benches.and the sidewalk.


Windsor, ON, Canada, November 12: Members of Congregation Beth El, aConservative synagogue on Mark Avenue in South Windsor, discoveredantisemitic graffiti on their building earlier this month. The exterior rearand west walls of the synagogue were spray painted with blue and red swas-tikas; in addition to the swastikas, the words “Free Palestine” were writtenon one wall. “It’s obviously upsetting,” said Hillery Guttman, president ofthe congregation. There are members of the congregation who had family inthe Holocaust, he said. He did not think that the incident, which he called“isolated,” is reflective of the broader community; he considers it the workof “a tiny group of delinquents.” Guttman said he stumbled on the graffitiwhen he arrived at the synagogue on Sunday morning to set up for an event.

Malmo, Sweden, November 17: Police in Sweden’s third-largest city arereporting a significant rise in the number of reported antisemitic hate crimesthis year. Recent statistics from Sweden’s National Council on Crime Pre-vention (Brottsforebyggande radet) revealed that nationwide in 2010, therewere 161 reported antisemitic hate crimes. “We reluctantly are issuing thisadvisory because religious Jews and other members of the Jewish commu-nity there have been subject to antisemitic taunts and harassment. Therehave been dozens of incidents reported to the authorities but have notresulted in arrests or convictions for hate crimes,” the center said in a state-ment. The upswing in antisemitic violence in Sweden is being attributed totwo key factors: the exponential increase in the number of Muslim immi-grants in the country, thanks to some of the most liberal immigration lawsin Europe; and to those left-wing politicians who never miss an opportunityto publicly demonize Israel. Muslims are now estimated to comprisebetween 20 and 25 percent of Malmo’s total population of around 300,000;much of the increase in anti-Jewish violence in recent years is being attrib-uted to idle Muslim immigrant youth.

Sydney, November 28: Jews in Australia faced 517 incidents of harassmentor intimidation in the year to September 30, a 31 percent rise from the yearbefore, according to the Jewish community’s annual report on antisemitism.“Put bluntly, in Australia this year, 10 times a week, every week, JewishAustralians were attacked or threatened,” report author Jeremy Jones said. Itis the 22nd year that Jones, community affairs director for the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, has produced the report, which showed a38 percent increase over the average of the previous 21 years but an 80percent drop on the record tally (2009).


DECEMBERCardiff, December 2: A Welsh MP has been accused of antisemitism afterquestioning whether a Jew ought to be Britain’s ambassador to Israel.Paul Flynn, who represents Newport West, made the remarks while ques-tioning Sir Gus O’Donnell during an inquiry by the Public AdministrationSelect Committee into the role of the head of the civil service. The presentcivil service chief was being questioned about his investigation into AdamWerritty, the controversial friend of former defense secretary Liam Fox.Flynn questioned the appointment of ambassador Matthew Gould, who tookup the post in Israel last year. Conspiracy theorists have alleged that Gould,Fox, and Werritty all met with Mossad, the Israeli secret service, in order todiscuss a possible strike on Iran. “I do not normally fall for conspiracytheories, but the ambassador has proclaimed himself to be a Zionist and hehas previously served in Iran, in the service,” Flynn said.

Winnipeg, December 6: Police confirmed that a 15-year-old boy had beencharged with assault with a weapon for allegedly using a lighter to burn thehair of a Jewish classmate while uttering antisemitic remarks in the halls ofOak Park High School. But while police said it was still being determinedwhether the boy will be charged with hate crimes, the boy had a message ofhis own—a picture of himself on his Facebook page wearing a shirt with aslogan relating that he loves “haters.” And he’s being lauded by othersonline for the alleged attack. The case shows the “durability of antisemit-ism,” said David Matas, a prominent Winnipeg lawyer who is senior honor-ary counsel for B’nai B’rith. “The fact that it should arise in somebody soyoung shows that it’s going to be projected into the future,” Matas said. “Itjust seems never to end.”

London, December 22: A 19-year-old man has been questioned by policeon suspicion of throwing eggs at Jews in two “drive-by” attacks in Hendonand Golders Green, in northwest London. In the first incident, four Jewishgirls in their early 20s had eggs thrown at them as they walked alongGolders Green Road. A similar attack took place when two Jews, a 29-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman, were egged and subjected to racialtaunts.

Hackensack, NJ, December 23: The Conservative Temple Beth El was van-dalized on the first night of Hanukkah, according to reports by NBC andCBS news. Swastikas were scrawled on the front door and west side of thesynagogue, along with four marks of white supremacy. In addition, thephrase, “Jews did 9/11” was sprayed on the sidewalk leading to the build-ing, NBC reported.


San Francisco, December 26: A lawsuit by two Jewish students accusingUC Berkeley of turning a blind eye to alleged intimidation by Arab studentsand fostering a climate of antisemitism has been dismissed by a federaljudge, Richard Seeborg, who said school officials have no duty to intervenein campus political disputes. The plaintiffs, a current student and a recentgraduate, said they and other Jews have been harassed during ApartheidWeek, held by Muslim student groups each year to protest Israeli policies.They said organizers set up checkpoints where demonstrators in militaryattire brandished fake weapons and asked passing students whether theywere Jewish. When plaintiff Jessica Felber walked by with a sign reading“Israel wants peace” at the March 2010 protest, a leader of Students forJustice in Palestine rammed her with a shopping cart, the suit alleged. Thesuit said demonstrators at other UC Berkeley events in the past decade havespat at Jewish students, disrupted pro-Israeli speakers, and comparedIsrael’s government to Nazi Germany.

Warsaw, December 29: The city published a calendar that includes a posterdepicting Jews as rats. The glossy publication, produced in conjunctionwith leading Polish artists and arts organizations, contains a foreword fromWarsaw’s mayor Hanna Gronkiewicz-Walc, who describes the calendar as“a beautiful showcase for the masterpieces of Polish graphic art.” She adds:“We can feel the atmosphere of bygone days.” Council spokesman BartoszMilczarczyk admitted that he had looked at all the illustrations carefully,


with deputy mayor Wlodzimierz Paszynski, and decided it contained noth-ing inappropriate.

New York, December 30: Fox Latin America ran a poll on its Facebookpage asking people to choose between Pontius Pilate, the high priests, andthe Jewish people. The poll was placed to promote a National GeographicChristmas special. Fox spokeswoman Guadalupe Lucero said that the net-work had put measures in place to prevent a repeat of the incident. In aletter to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, she said the poll contradicted themission and spirit of National Geographic worldwide. “We sincerely apolo-gize for the publication of a poll that might have unintentionally given placeto interpretations, opinions or expressions of intolerance affecting the Jew-ish community,” she said. “We deeply regret the incident.” The suggestionthat Jews were responsible for the “deicide”—the killing of Jesus—hasbeen something that has damaged Jewish-Christian relations for centuries,but even the Vatican disowned the idea more than four decades ago. Dr.Shimon Samuels, the Wiesenthal Center’s director for international rela-tions, said it was an outrage to see repeated a slur that “resulted in persecu-tion and murder of Jews for two millennia.”

In an Academic Voice:Antisemitism and Academy Bias

Kenneth Lasson*

Current events and the recent literature strongly suggest that antisemitismand anti-Zionism are often conflated and can no longer be viewed asdistinct phenomena. The following paper provides an overview of con-temporary media and scholarship concerning antisemitic/anti-Zionistevents and rhetoric on college campuses. This analysis leads to the con-clusion that those who are naive about campus antisemitism should exer-cise greater vigilance and be more aggressive in confronting the problem.

Key Words: Antisemitism, Higher Education, Israel, American Jews

In America, Jews feel very comfortable, but there are islands of anti-Semitism: the American college campus.

—Natan Sharansky1

While universities like to nurture the perception that they are protec-tors of reasoned discourse, and indeed often perceive themselves as sacro-sanct places of culture in a chaotic world, the modern campus is, of course,not quite so wonderful. The romanticized vision of life in the IvoryTower—a peaceful haven where learned professors ponder higher thoughtsand where students roam orderly quadrangles in quest of truth and otherpleasures—has long been relegated to yesteryear.

In fact, the academic enterprise in America was besmirched by racismearly in its history: until the latter part of the twentieth century, segregationand ethnic quotas were the norm, not the exception. But what was onceaccepted prejudicial policy has now given way to an aberrational form ofpolitical correctness, which still vividly illustrates failures of scholarlyrigor—the abandonment of reliance on facts, common sense, and logic inthe pursuit of narrow political agendas—and which are all too often

1. Natan Sharansky came to prominence as a prisoner in the former SovietUnion. From 2003 to 2005 he served as Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, and iscurrently chairman of the Jewish Agency. He made these remarks in the documen-tary film Columbia Unbecoming. See “Campus Anti-Semitism: A Briefing Beforethe United States Commission on Civil Rights Held in Washington, D.C., Novem-ber 18, 2005,” http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/081506campusantibrief07.pdf.

349


presented in the academic voice. Instead of a community of scholars thirst-ing for knowledge in sylvan tranquility, what we frequently encounter (par-ticularly in England and Europe, but in elite American universities as well)are hotbeds of radical turmoil.

Among the abuses of intellectual honesty that have been taking placein American universities, particularly over the past decade, is the loud andstrident opposition to Israel. Frequently camouflaged as righteous protestsagainst the “apartheid” policies of an “oppressive” regime, vehement pro-tests against the Jewish State are held on a growing number of campuses.

While the number of overt antisemitic incidents has declined in theUnited States over the past few years, there has been a significant increasein anti-Zionist rhetoric and activity on campuses around the country.Though the two concepts are not always identical, in today’s world theyalmost completely overlap. Indeed, modern anti-Zionism and antisemitismare virtually confluent—and ultimately impossible to distinguish in anyway but semantically.

Thus has anti-Zionism—which in its narrowest dimension is an argu-ment directed against the political realization of the State of Israel, but in itslatter-day context has provided those who dislike Jews a convenient cloakbehind which to hide—morphed into antisemitism.

Many such sentiments are expressed by individual professors. Themost notorious recent example is the book The Israel Lobby and U.S. For-eign Policy, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.2

Words matter. They can cause damage. They have consequences.3

Moreover, articulate academic anti-Zionists use well-crafted rhetoric to dif-fuse critics.4 While the First Amendment broadly protects freedom ofspeech, even for libertarians, the Constitution has limits. Defamation is pun-

2. See notes 172ff. and accompanying text [unless otherwise noted, all refer-ences to notes in these footnotes are to other footnotes in this same list]; see alsoRupert Cornwell, Out of America, www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/rupert-cornwell-out-of-america-464069.html.

3. See Victor Sharpe, “Words Have Consequences,” The Jerusalem Connec-tion Report, July 14, 2011, http://www.thejerusalemconnection.us/blog/2011/07/14/words-have-consequences.html; and Mary Elizabeth Williams, “The New HighPrice of Mouthing Off,” Salon, http://www.salon.com/2011/06/21/megan_fox_john_galliano_anti_semitism/.

4. See, e.g., comments to Alex Katz, “Antisemitism Thrives in Academia,”Stanford Review, January 18, 2011, http://stanfordreview.org/article/anti-semitism-thrives-in-academia; see also comments to Eric T. Justin, “Protocols of the Eldersof Crazy,” Harvard Crimson, October 3, 2011, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/10/3/arab-world-antisemitism-jews/. For a broader discussion of this phenom-enon, see note 55ff. and accompanying text.

2011] IN AN ACADEMIC VOICE 351

ishable, for example, as is speech that incites to violence. But the problemwith regulating hate speech is where to draw the line. While an academicinstitution should not allow itself to become a forum for bigotry, neithershould its freedom of expression be limited. It is better to err on the side ofliberty; an excess of tolerance is still preferable to censorship.5

Students today increasingly find themselves confronted by curriculamanipulated by scholarly extremists. Principles of academic freedom andthe universality of science should have prevented such noxious campaigns,but they have not.

The much-ballyhooed quest for “balance” raises problems of its own.Must Holocaust studies be balanced by Holocaust denial? To what extentcan evolution be balanced by “intelligent design”? Does the obligationtoward balance cover every point taught in a course, or only major dis-putes? Who is to enforce the norm?

Antisemitism is not just name-calling, but something much more cor-rosive and damaging.

Responses to hate speech or disruptive behavior must be firm, immedi-ate, and consequential. To the extent that those who spout antisemitic rheto-ric are in our faces, we must be in theirs.

Ironically, perhaps the most pernicious effects of academic antisemit-ism can be illustrated by looking at what happened to the short-lived YaleInitiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA).6

This article examines how the relationship between antisemitic andanti-Zionist speech and conduct both play out on contemporary universitycampuses—and suggests ways in which such rhetoric and conduct can beconfronted without doing harm to First Amendment principles.7

5. See Assaf Sagiv, “A Study in Hate,” Azure (Spring 2010):14.6. See section in this article entitled “The Yale Initiative.”7. I have addressed most of the issues treated herein in other forums. See, e.g.,

Kenneth Lasson, “Antisemitism in the Academic Voice” (chapters in two books:Antisemitism on Campus: Past and Present, Eunice Pollack, ed. [Brighton, MA:Academic Studies Press, 2011], and Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity,Charles Small, ed. [Brill Academic Publishers, 2012]; see also Kenneth Lasson,“Defending Truth: Legal and Psychological Aspects of Holocaust Denial,” CurrentPsychology (November 2007); and “Scientific and Scholarly Boycotts of Israel:Abusing the Academic Enterprise,” Touro Law Review 21 (2006):989.


THE BACKDROP: FROM MARX TO BIG LIES

Religion is the . . . opium of the people. Marxism is the opium of theintellectuals.

—Karl Marx and Edmund Wilson

Antisemitism in the academy is not a new phenomenon. Much of it canbe traced to Karl Marx, whose 1844 essay “On the Jewish Question” was anearly reflection of modern leftist thought. “What is the profane basis ofJudaism?” asked Marx. “Practical need, self-interest,” he answered. “Whatis the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god?Money. Very well: then in emancipating itself from huckstering and money,and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself. . . the emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of mankind fromJudaism.”8

Marx was a classic antisemite, not unlike those fabricators of The Pro-tocols of the Elders of Zion, who viewed civilization as having been cap-tured and destroyed by Jewish values, practices, and conspiracies. Let theworld be rid of the Jews was (and is) the message, and all will be well.9

Some historians offer a psychological explanation for Marx’s hatred ofJews. No matter what he did in his life, he could not shed being branded aJew—although he did not consider himself one. In fact, when he was born,in 1818, his father, who had changed his name from Herschel Levi toHeinrich Marx, had already converted to Christianity and had his own sixliving children baptized.10

Marxism was not the only early antecedent to modern Jewish leftistshostile to Jews in general and Israel in particular. Jewish members of theCommunist Party had good reason to draw a line between themselves and

8. Sally F. Zerker, quoting Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in “Anti-Zionist Jewish Leftists Are Part of a Line Stretching Back to Marx,” CanadianJewish News, November 26, 2009. Ms. Zerker is a professor emeritus at York Uni-versity in Canada. Marx also famously said (in 1843, in his Contribution to Cri-tique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right”) that “religion is the opiate of the masses,”to which Edmund Wilson responded over a century later: “Marxism is the opiate ofthe intellectuals (conservativeforum.org, http://www.conservativeforum.org/authquot.asp?ID=958). The quote is originally attributed to Raymond Aron, L’Opiomdes intellectuals (1955).

9. Zerker, “Anti-Zionist Jewish Leftists.”10. Karl Marx was six years old when he was converted to Christianity. Zerker,

“Anti-Zionist Jewish Leftists.”


the Jewish community at large—even though they had to form their ownbranch of the party, which at the time was blatantly antisemitic.11

Academic antisemites in Germany may not have participated inpogroms, but their “scholarship” during the Third Reich served to legiti-mize anti-Jewish policies. Much about them is surveyed by Alan Steinweisin his book, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,which reveals how willingly some scholars were to endorse the Nazis’world view prevailing at that time. Moreover, they continued their aca-demic antisemitism after the war. Alan Steinweis effectively illustrateswhat is at stake when scholarship is placed at the service of politics.12

Through it all, ample usage has been made of the Big Lie—a classicmodern-day manifestation of the truth-twisting tactic made notorious byNazi propagandists during World War II.13

Israel has long stood accused of conducting a harsh military occupa-tion of Arab lands inhabited by an indigenous, peace-seeking Arab popula-tion—despite overwhelming evidence that such charges have no basis infact.

The misnamed “occupation” allegedly began after Israel’s 1967 vic-tory in the Six-Day war, when Jews began to settle in the disputed biblicalareas known as Judea and Samaria. Initially, Arab reactions were positive:

11. Zerker, “Anti-Zionist Jewish Leftists.”12. Alan E. Steinweis, Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Ger-

many (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See also Mikael Tos-savainen, review of Studying the Jew: Scholarly Antisemitism in Nazi Germany,Canadian Journal of History, December 22, 2006.

13. The Big Lie as a tool of propaganda was introduced by Adolf Hitler in his1925 autobiography Mein Kampf. To be effective, he wrote, it “must be so colossalthat no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort thetruth so infamously.” He went on to suggest that “in the big lie there is always acertain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always moreeasily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously orvoluntarily.” The Big Lie was used by Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propa-ganda, who understood that not only must the false claim be colossal, but it alsomust contain at least a kernel of truth, and be repeated with great frequency. In theMiddle East today, the necessary kernel of truth is that in fact Israel does occupyJudea, Samaria, and Jerusalem—but in the same way it occupies Tel Aviv andHaifa. So too does the United States occupy Miami and Los Angeles, with theirminority Latino populations, as does Canada occupy Quebec, with its minorityFrench population. See Zelig Fried, “Occupation—The Big Lie,” Arutz Sheva(Israel National News), December 27, 2007, http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/7656. See also Israel Frederick Krantz, “On Campus: Defend-ing the University Means Winning the Ideoloical War,” Israfax, August 23, 2009,266.


Jews would regularly visit Arab towns and villages, and employ and pro-vide assistance to local townspeople; the Arab standard of living improvedsignificantly as per-capita income increased and modern infrastructures—roads, water supplies, electricity, medical care, and telephone communica-tions—were developed. Tourism flourished. Arabs and Jews worked andshopped together in Haifa, Ramallah, and Bethlehem. Roadblocks were vir-tually unknown.14

Following Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s groundbreaking visit toJerusalem in 1977 and the Camp David peace accords, Israel withdrew fromthe Sinai Peninsula and has been at peace with Egypt ever since.

These pacific relationships were dramatically altered in 1993 with thesigning of the Oslo Accords, which ceded administrative control of theWest Bank to the Palestinian National Authority (formerly the PLO).Emboldened by the promise of an independent Palestinian state in Judea,Samaria, and Gaza, Arab leaders urged their constituents to demand theremoval of all Jewish communities in their midst, which they now claimedas exclusively their own. In 1994, Israel granted the Palestinian Authorityautonomous control of the major Arab cities and towns in these territories.15

For its part, the PA agreed to end propaganda attacks that called forIsrael’s destruction—a promise it never fulfilled. Instead, a new rallyingcall was introduced: “End the Occupation.” The modern rebirth of Israelbegan in the nineteenth century, with the reclamation of largely vacant landby pioneering Zionists, who soon became a Jewish majority. Few thought itodd that, although throughout their 2000-year exile there was a continuousJewish presence in the Holy Land, they were now accused of occupying it.Few questioned the historical incongruity that, having been sovereign inJudea, Samaria, and the lands west of the Jordan River for a thousand years,they would be branded occupiers. Judea, after all, had been named after itsJewish residents.16

14. Fried, “Occupation.” “Occupation” is a hyperbolic term when used in thiscontext—similar in nature to Nakhba (Arabic for “catastrophe,” the word used byPalestinians to describe Israel’s independence in 1948).

15. Fried, “Occupation.” In 1995, Jordan signed a peace treaty with Egypt.16. It was not until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the majority of

Arabs living west of the Jordan River migrated to the area. During that period, theland was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, and, subsequent to that, until the foundingof the state of Israel, it was under the control of the British Empire. Fried, “Occupa-tion.” Following Israel’s War of Independence, in 1948, Egypt occupied Gaza, Jor-dan—the West Bank, and Syria—the Golan Heights. None were there to help thePalestinians create their own homeland.


Moreover, Jerusalem had been known since the dawn of history as aJewish city: it is mentioned in the Old Testament no fewer than 600 times—but not once in the Koran.

Nowhere has the Big Lie been more popular than in the universities,where to this day scores of anti-Zionist professors seek to denigrate Israel atevery opportunity. The “occupation” mantra has assumed such magnitudethat it has spawned a host of related myths, particularly that Israel’s militaryhas met Arab resistance with cruelty and insensitivity by setting up pur-posefully “humiliating” checkpoints to harass innocent Arabs. This too fliesin the face of ample evidence to the contrary. No army besides Israel’s hashad to deal with more suicide bombers, deadly ambushes, drive-by shoot-ings, kidnappings, and rock throwing interspersed with rifle fire, on a dailybasis and for so extended a period. The Israel Defense Forces are widelyviewed by other democratic nations as models of humane behavior, thor-oughly trained to respect the sanctity of life and to demonstrate an individ-ual and collective morality greatly exceeding that of other militaryregimes.17

In the best tradition of the Big Lie, propaganda is promulgated as fact.Thus, there have been repeated assertions that Israel: (a) is the primarystumbling block to achieving a “Two-State Solution”; (b) is a nuclear powerthat presents the greatest threat to peace and stability in the Middle East;and (c) is an apartheid state deserving of international boycotts, divestmentcampaigns, and sanctions; (d) plans to “Judaize” Jerusalem by buildingthousands of new homes in the eastern part of the Holy City; (e) adoptspolicies that, besides endangering U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, arethe root cause of worldwide antisemitism; and (f) is primarily responsiblefor a “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, against whose citizens it commit-ted war crimes.

Trumpeting these claims loudly and often enough has allowed them totake on the character of unassailable truths. Were they subjected to the sameobjective scrutiny that academic historians and political scientists tradition-ally require of their disciplines, many if not all of them would prove with-out merit.

Today’s Muslims and Palestinians draw on the earlier experiences ofradical black students. The Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, and

17. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZW5VaxxBhCw; see also http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/IDF_ethics.html.


Stokely Carmichael pioneered the demonizing of Jews and Israel in theuniversities.18

The Pavlovian responses of university administrators—a combinationof fear and condescension—have set the bar of incitement from today’sprotected groups so high that only physical violence is treated as off-limits.19

CANARDS ON CONTEMPORARY CAMPUSES:ANTISEMITISM VS. ANTI-ZIONISM

One of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to provethat the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a dis-tinction at all.

—Abba Eban20

In the first decade of this century, antisemitism and anti-Zionism weresystemic in the United States and elsewhere. Jewish and pro-Israel studentsacross the country are patronized, mocked, intimidated, and sometimesphysically attacked, while anti-Israel professors exercise bully pulpits,expressing the dominant narrative that the Palestinians are cruellyoppressed, and that Arabs are suffering needlessly at the hands of racist,apartheid, and genocidal Israeli occupiers.21

18. See Eunice Pollack, “African Americans and the Legitimization ofAntisemitism on the Campus,” in Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present,Eunice Pollack, ed. (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011).

19. Alex Joffe, “Jewish Ideas Daily: Anti-Semitism 101,” Jerusalem Post, April8, 2011.

20. In his career, Abba Eban (1915-2002) was the Israeli foreign affairs minis-ter, education minister, deputy prime minister, and ambassador to the United Statesand to the United Nations. He was also vice president of the United Nations Gen-eral Assembly and president of the Weizmann Institute of Science. After leavinggovernment service, in 1980, he devoted the rest of his life to writing and teaching,including serving as a visiting academic at Princeton, Columbia, and George Wash-ington universities.

21. Joffe, “Jewish Ideas Daily” (note 19). Notable recent books on academicantisemitism include Manuel Gerstenfeld, ed., Academics Against Israel and theJews (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2007); Kenneth Marcus, Jewish Identityand Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press, 2010), which addresseslegal issues related to Jews as an ethnic group; Jerome Karabel’s study, The Cho-sen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, andPrinceton (Houghton Mifflin, 2005), which is on the history of admissions policiesat elite institutions that discriminated against Jews on account of their “character”;the new collection by Eunice Pollack, Anti-Semitism on the Campus: Past andPresent (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2011); and Gary Tobin et al.,


In this century’s second decade—although there has been neither abroad-based resurgence of antisemitic attitudes on college campuses nor awidespread rejection of Israel in favor of the Palestinian cause—a hard-coreminority of anti-Israel and antisemitic academics have gained dispropor-tionate influence in university life.22

STATISTICS AND NARRATIVES

According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), since 2002 therehave been close to 100 major antisemitic incidents per year occurring onAmerican university campuses.23 The most overt acts have come in theform of harassment and intimidation; they range from minor physical con-tact (such as spitting) to more extreme violence involving lethal weapons.24

A pattern of antisemitism, usually camouflaged as anti-Zionism, hasemerged at elite universities in California and the Ivy League. At the Uni-versity of California Irvine, for example, with a student population of about24,000—a thousand of whom are Jewish—there have been numerous inci-dents of property destruction, physical threats, and actual violence.25

In 2002, an article appeared in a UCI student publication claiming thatJews are a genetically different and inferior race. Posters began appearing

Uncivil University: Politics and Propaganda in American Education (San Fran-cisco: Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 2005).

22. Kenneth Marcus, “Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism,” JewishIdeas Daily, March 28, 2011.

23. This number represents only those incidents that have been reported anddocumented. It is likely that many such acts go unreported because of fear, intimi-dation, or embarrassment. The exact number of incidents per year are: 2002: 106;2003: 68; 2004: 74; 2005: 98, 2006: 88; 2007: 94; 2008: 85. For current statistics,see “2010 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents,” Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/2010_Audit.

24. Such a trend can be traced back at least fifteen years. In March 1995, forexample, at the University of Pennsylvania, two Jewish students were walking nearcampus when they heard derogatory epithets shouted at them by two other students.One of the harassers went into a nearby house and returned with a threateningshotgun. Police and university officials questioned the perpetrators and confiscatedtheir weapons. Ultimately, the harassed students decided not to press charges; oneof the perpetrators was “voluntarily separated” from the university. See JeffreyRoss and the ADL, Schooled in Hate: Antisemitism on Campus (1997), http://www.adl.org/sih/SIH-print.asp (hereinafter Schooled in Hate).

25. Susan B. Tuchman, “Statement Submitted to the U.S. Commission on CivilRights Briefing on Campus Antisemitism,” Briefing Report on Campus Antisemit-ism, U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, July 2006, 13, 14. For a discussion ofantisemitism as anti-Zionism, see notes 36-63 and accompanying text.


on campus depicting the Star of David (the traditional Jewish symbol) drip-ping with blood, and equating it with the swastika.26 In 2003, a Holocaustmemorial on the campus was destroyed almost immediately after it was setup. Jewish students commemorating the Nazi horrors found a swastikacarved into a table near where they had gathered.27 In 2004, a confrontationbetween Jewish and Arab students became a campus cause celebre. TheJewish student, wearing a skullcap and a pin captioned “United We Stand”and framed by American and Israeli flags, was walking inside an academicbuilding. He was soon surrounded and threatened by Arab students, one ofwhom shouted “Ee Bakh al Yahud!” (“Slaughter the Jews!”).28

UCI, of course, does not stand alone as a focal point for such intimida-tion and harassment.29

In May 2002, at San Francisco State University, four hundred Jewishstudents held an Israeli-Palestinian “Sit-in for Peace in the Middle East”—an attempt to engage in a civilized dialogue with their counterparts. TheJewish students spoke of their support for Israel, and their hope that apeaceful settlement could be achieved. When the event concluded, aboutthirty of the Jewish students were surrounded by a group of pro-Palestinianstudents, who shouted, “Hitler didn’t finish the job,” “F— the Jews,” and“Die, racist pigs.” University and city police were quick to react, forming abarrier between the Jewish and pro-Palestinian students and eventuallyleading the Jewish students out of the plaza. A freelance reporter wrote thatshe was “convinced that if the police had not been present there would havebeen violence.”30

26. Kenneth L. Marcus, “The Resurgence of Antisemitism on American CollegeCampuses,” Current Psychology, 26(3-4, 2007):206, 210; and “Anti-Zionism asRacism: Campus Anti-Semitism and the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” William andMary Bill of Rights Journal (2007):837.

27. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Briefing Report on Campus Antisemitism(2005), 14.

28. Soon thereafter, the Jewish student left the university to study somewhereelse. At least one other student has also left UCI because of the hostile environmenton campus. Briefing Report on Campus Antisemitism (2005), 14. For recentresponses to the UCI incidents noted, see notes 212ff. and accompanying text.

29. In April 2002, a Jewish student at Illinois State University was solicited tosign a petition in support of Palestinians; when he asked whether the petitionaddressed the issue of suicide bombings, an organizer of the group told him itaddressed how to blow off the Jewish student’s head. antisemitism/Anti-IsraelEvents on Campus (May 14, 2002), http://www.adl.org/CAMPUS/campus_incidents.asp.

30. Karen Alexander, “San Francisco Dispatch,” The New Republic (June 24,2002):17. See also Briefing Report on Campus Antisemitism, U.S. Commission onCivil Rights, July 2006, 24.


On the same campus, antisemitic activities are often the focus of pro-Palestinian rallies. In 2002, an anti-Israel rally staged by Arab and Muslimstudents featured posters with pictures of soup cans reading “Made inIsrael” on the label: under the “contents,” the words “Palestinian ChildrenMeat” was found, and a photo of a baby with its stomach sliced open andthe words “according to Jewish Rites under American license” were pic-tured on the bottom of the can.31

Psychological intimidation may be the most prevalent form of harass-ment, often experienced through acts of vandalism to public and privateproperty. In February 2006, at the University of California, Berkeley, theword “kike” was painted on the front porch of a Jewish fraternity house.32

Similar incidents were reported in October and December of the same yearin other American universities.33

A more extreme example of intimidation and violence occurred in2008 near the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island. InMarch of that year Yossi Knafo, an emissary from the Jewish Agency ofIsrael, was in his kitchen when firebombs were thrown at his building,burning the outside.34 Although Knafo was unharmed, the incident had aprofound effect on students on campus—the Hillel house was locked down,and a police officer had to be stationed outside. Students told administratorsthat they felt unsafe and vulnerable.35

Stanford University, the august “Harvard of the West,” has been simi-larly tainted by antisemitic incidents and rhetoric. In late 2009, a sukkah(the temporary hut constructed in celebration of the festival of Tabernacles)in front of Stanford’s Hillel building was vandalized with graffiti; Stanfordprofessor Joel Beinin is well known for his vitriolic anti-Israel lectures.36

31. Alexander, “San Francisco Dispatch.”32. “Antisemitic Incidents in U.S. Decline in 2006, Despite Year Marked By

Violent Attacks” (2006), http://www.antisemitism.org.il/eng/adl.33. “Antisemitic Incidents in U.S. Decline.” At the University of Northern Col-

orado, the words “F—ing Jews” was written on a Jewish student’s dormitory roomdoor. At Ramapo College, in New Jersey, a professor found swastikas and thewords “Die, Jew Bitch” written on her whiteboard. At the State University of NewYork, Albany, students found swastikas and “KKK” painted on the walls near alecture center.

34. Jayakrishna Nandini, “Hillel Staffer Moving On After Attack, Brown DailyHerald (April 9, 2008), http://www.browndailyherald.com/2.12235/hillel-staffer-moving-on-after-attack-1.1670469.

35. Nandini, “Hillel Staffer.”36. Alex Katz, “Antisemitism Thrives in Academia,” Stanford Review, January

18, 2011, http://stanfordreview.org/article/anti-semitism-thrives-in-academia.


ANTI-ZIONISM AS ANTISEMITISM

In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to separate state-ments critical of Israel from those that are motivated by antisemitism. Theformer are often thinly veiled versions of the latter.37

Anti-Zionist incidents tend to increase in frequency with the changingintensity of perceptions about the State of Israel. During the intifada of the1980s, for example, there was a sharp rise in anti-Zionism, reflecting theperceived evils perpetrated by the Israeli army against the Palestinian peo-ple. In the 1988-89 academic year, the University of Michigan’s studentnewspaper published a good number of anti-Israel rhetoric, including sev-eral editorials censuring a Jewish student group that sought to call attentionto Arab terrorism.38

Although the mood changed somewhat after the 1991 Gulf War andthe subsequent election of the Labor government in 1992, and there was asimilar period of relative tranquility following the assassination of Israeliprime minister Yitzhak Rabin (in November 1995), anti-Zionist rhetoricbegan to increase shortly thereafter. California State (Fresno) University’sDaily Collegian carried a particularly anti-Jewish article: one student wasquoted as saying that “When they [the Jews] disobeyed G-d, they broke thecovenant; from that point on it’s no longer their land.”39

In the early part of the 21st century, with the start of the secondintifada and Yasser Arafat’s refusal to accept the Oslo Accords, anti-Zionistand antisemitic incidents began to increase. At the University of CaliforniaIrvine, a registered student group initiated annual weeklong events entitled“Anti-Zionist Week,” “Zionist Awareness Week,” and “Israel AwarenessWeek.” The message was always the same: the Jews control the U.S. gov-ernment and use the media to brainwash others; in turn, Jews need to be“rehabilitated” from the “psychosis” that exists in the Jewish community.40

Such strident propaganda leaves many Jewish students feeling alien-ated and marginalized, afraid to identify themselves as Jewish or as sup-porters of a Jewish state.41

37. This sentiment is hardly unique to the author. See, e.g., Caroline Glick, “SeeNo Evil,” Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2010.

38. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate (note 24).39. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate.40. U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Briefing Notes (note 25).41. In 2002, a female graduate student wrote a letter to the UCI chancellor,

explaining:Not only do I feel scared to walk around proudly as a Jewish person onthe UC Irvine campus, am terrified for anyone to find out. Today I feltthreatened that if students knew that I am Jewish and that I support a


In 2002, a construction site for new dormitories at UC Santa Barbarawas defaced with anti-Israel/antisemitic graffiti, including the phrases “AntiZion/Nuke Israel,” “G-d Hates Jews,” and “Burn the Torah.” At the Univer-sity of Colorado Boulder, antisemitic messages, including the phrase “YourTax Dollars Are Paying to Kill Palestinian Children,” appeared on side-walks throughout the campus on the first day of the planned observance ofHolocaust Awareness Week. The next day at UC Berkeley, 79 pro-Palestin-ian protesters were arrested after storming into a classroom in an attempt todisrupt a Holocaust Remembrance Day commemoration. At San FranciscoState University, following a pro-Israel rally, Jewish students, faculty, andcampus visitors were verbally assaulted and threatened. A group of pro-Palestinian counter-demonstrators hurled epithets at the crowd, including,“Go back to Russia” and “Hitler did not finish the job.”

In 2008, of the 85 antisemitic incidents reported on college and univer-sity campuses (compared to an annual average of 88 incidents each yearsince 2002),42 many of them were of an anti-Zionist nature and, as before,many such demonstrations occurred in California. In September of thatyear, for example, a pro-Israel poster displayed at a bus stop at UC Berke-ley was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, including swastikas, and a pro-Israel poster was defaced with antisemitic graffiti, also including swasti-kas.43 In May 2009, a large “Apartheid Wall” display was erected at UCIrvine showing inflammatory photographs and accusing Israel of deliber-ately killing Palestinian children.44 At UC Santa Cruz, a building was van-

Jewish state, I would be attacked physically. It is my right to walkaround this campus and not fear other students and hear condemnationfrom them. It is my right for my government to protect me from harmfrom others. It is my right as a citizen who pays tuition and taxes to beprotected from such harm . . . YOU may claim the first amendment. Iclaim the right to be safe and secure. You cannot use the first amend-ment as an argument against my safety. MY SAFETY SUPERCEDESFIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS (emphasis in original).

Notably, the chancellor never responded. An administrator who did respond sug-gested that the student visit the Counseling Center to help her “work on her feel-ings.” U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Briefing Notes.

42. “Campus Incidents by Year, as Compiled by the Anti-Defamation League”:2008: 85; 2007: 94; 2006: 88; 2005: 98; 2004: 74; 2003: 68; 2002: 106. For currentstatistics, see “2010 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents,” Anti-Defamation League,http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/2010_Audit.

43. Emily Friedman, assistant director, Washington, DC, Anti-DefamationLeague, e-mail message to author, November 16, 2009.

44. Photos of Anne Frank were used to compare her fate at the hands of theNazis with what is happening to Palestinians today. See “Creating Hate at UC


dalized with antisemitic graffiti alleging that Jews were behind the 9/11attacks.45

Other campuses around the country experienced similar incidents in2008, including Anna Maria College (swastikas and “white power” drawnon hallway walls); Baylor University (swastikas near dorm room of studentwho had recently converted to Judaism); Colorado University at Boulder(Jewish student subjected to antisemitic harassment by her roommate); Illi-nois State University (KKK fliers distributed on campus); MiddlesexCounty (N.J.) College (antisemitic graffiti); Rowan University (dormitorypainted with swastikas and the phrase “Hitler is awesome”); Rutgers Uni-versity (antisemitic graffiti in stairwell); Saint Xavier University (neo-Nazigroup demonstrating outside the building at which Holocaust survivor ElieWiesel was presenting a lecture); Seton Hall University (numerousantisemitic and racial slurs drawn on the walls of the men’s restroom);Temple University (two individuals physically assaulted and subjected toantisemitic taunts); the University of North Carolina (Jewish studentharassed by new roommate, who claimed that Jews control world’s bankingand entertainment industries); the University of North Dakota (studentharassed by others with antisemitic slurs, then shot at with pellet gun); andthe University of Oregon (Holocaust denier David Irving addressed studentsat an event sponsored by Pacifica Forum).46

In January 2009, at San Francisco State University, reacting to an anti-Hamas, anti-terror petition, members of a group called the General Union ofPalestinian Students (GUPS) assaulted students of the SFSU CollegeRepublicans, who had set up the petition.47 The GUPS accused the Repub-licans of “acts of incivility,” “intimidation,” and the creation of a “hostileenvironment” on campus—despite the fact that the GUPS routinely spon-sors radical speakers who demonize Jews, Zionists, Israel, Republicans, andAmerica.”48

Irvine,” May 13, 2009, http://www.standwithus.com/app/iNews/view_n.asp?ID=1033.

45. “Creating Hate at UC Irvine.”46. “Creating Hate at UC Irvine.”47. The Republicans allowed students to throw a shoe at a Hamas flag, which

was similar to their 2007 anti-terrorism rally, where they invited students to stompon the flags of Hezbollah and Hamas. Richard L. Cravatts, “Hate Speech at SanFrancisco State University,” American Thinker, http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/o2/hate_speech_at_san-francisco_s.html.

48. Cravatts, “Hate Speech.” The Supreme Court has repeatedly declared thatburning, defacing, or desecrating flags is protected speech under the First Amend-ment. See Texas v. Johnson, 491 U.S. 397 (1989), and U.S. v. Eichman, 496 U.S.310 (1990).


Unfortunately, the above cases are merely illustrative of many otherantisemitic incidents that have been reported on American campuses. Simi-lar situations occur at universities around the world.

In April 2010, two pro-Israel students at Carleton University in Ottawawere physically and verbally assaulted off-campus by ten men, whoaccused them in Arabic for being Zionists, hit one of them in the back ofthe head, calling him a “f—ing Jew,” and came at them with a machete.49

During “Israeli Apartheid Week” at Carleton, the campus safety departmentdiscovered and reported to the police antisemitic graffiti in a bathroom—“Kill a Jew slow + painfully,” “Nuke Israel,” and “White Power.”50

A spokesman for the university responded to these incidents by statingthat “certain kinds of behavior are not acceptable,”51 but pointedly refusedto address the issue of antisemitism on campus, stating that its role is toprovide a forum for debates and discussions regarding the Middle East.52

Echoing that view, a member of the Faculty for Palestine group, whichsupports the student group that organizes “Israeli Apartheid Week” atCarleton, believes that the controversy is “healthy” and that there is “noth-ing wrong with heated debate.”53

York University in Toronto has likewise been the scene of overtantisemitism in recent years. In April 2008, York’s Hillel brought then-Knesset member Natan Sharansky to the campus for a speaking engage-ment. Members of the Palestinian Students Association and StudentsAgainst Israeli Apartheid@York (SAIA) shouted down Sharansky, yelling

49. Dave Rogers, “Machete Used in Antisemitic Attack in Gatineau, CarltonStudents Say,” The Ottawa Citizen, April 6, 2010, http://www.vancouversun.com/Machete+used+anti+Semitic+attack+Carleton+students/2766537/story.html; AdamDaifallah, “The Bitter Campus Divide,” National Post, April 8, 2010, http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2010/04/08/adam-daifallah-adding-a-machete-to-the-bitter-campus-divide.aspx.

50. Matthew Pearson, “Hate Crimes Unit Probes Antisemitic Graffiti on Cam-pus,” The Ottawa Citizen, April 7, 2010, http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Hate+crimes+unit+probes+anti+Semitic+graffiti+campus/2770759/story.html.

51. Rogers, “Machete Used” (note 49).52. Pearson, “Hate Crimes Unit Probes” (note 50).53. Pearson, “Hate Crimes Unit Probes.” In reaction to the incidents at Carleton

University, Adam Daifallah, a Canadian journalist of Palestinian descent, noted thedegree to which student governments have become involved. Like Arab-Israelijournalist Khaled Abu Toameh, Daifallah agrees that one can be both pro-Israel andpro-Palestine: “To be truly pro-Palestinian is to oppose the murderous kleptocratsrunning the Palestinian Authority and to oppose the use of violent intimidation inthe campus debate.” Unfortunately, says Daifallah, most Palestinian activists, espe-cially the younger and more radical, do not share this view. Daifallah, “The BitterCampus Divide (note 49).”


“Get off our campus, you genocidal racist,” and “[Y]ou are bringing a sec-ond Holocaust upon yourselves.”54 In February 2009, police had to usherJewish students to safety after 100 Palestinian sympathizers barricaded theJewish students in the campus Hillel offices.55

(The question has been asked why in Canada, where multiculturism isvalued and criticism of protected minorities has been criminalized as hatespeech, are radical students allowed to get away with targeting one group[Jewish students] with speech and actions that are specifically forbiddenagainst any others.”56 The same question can certainly be asked about whatregularly occurs on American campuses, where university officials declaretheir firm commitment to the constitutional principle of freedom of speech,yet appear to enable certain groups to defame Israel and Jews under thepretense that they are fostering intellectual debate and constructive politicaldiscourse. Can this fairly be called “scholarship”—or is it merely antisemit-ism in the academic voice?)

Although anti-Israel activity may not necessarily constitute antisemit-ism, when individuals or groups accuse Israel of committing war crimes byresponding forcefully to terrorist bombardments of its citizens—as hap-pened most recently in the incursion into Gaza known as Operation CastLead—the sentiment becomes clear. As Abraham Foxman, national directorof the Anti-Defamation League, puts it: “Sixty years after the Holocaust, weare watching one layer after another of the constraints against antisemitism,which arose as a result of the murder of six million, being peeled away. Theworld is losing its shame about antisemitism. As a result, antisemitism isbecoming more acceptable in wider circles.”57

As noted earlier, articulate academics can use words effectively to dif-fuse criticism that their anti-Zionism is in fact a form of antisemitism.58 Forexample, an article in The Stanford Review, entitled “Antisemitism Thrivesin Academia,” elicited various comments to the effect that there is noantisemitism at Stanford.59 “Being against the practices of Israel’s govern-ment,” said one, “isn’t any more antisemitic than being against the practices

54. Pearson, “Hate Crimes Unit Probes.”55. Richard L. Cravatts, “Is Assaulting Jewish Students on Canadian Campuses

Now Legitimate Criticism of Israel?,” Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, Feb-ruary 10, 2010, http://spme.net/cgi-bin/articles.cgi?ID=6480.

56. Cravatts, “Is Assaulting Jewish Students.” See also Barbara Kay, “ToxicClassrooms,” National Post, November 30, 2009.

57. Abraham H. Foxman, speech in Indianapolis, November 23, 2009, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Semitism_Domestic/Indiana_Achievement_Address.htm.

58. See notes 3-4 and accompanying text.59. Alex Katz, “Antisemitism Thrives in Academia,” The Stanford Review,

XLV, 7 (2011).


of America’s government is anti-American or being against the practices ofIran’s government is anti-Islam. Many people who critique Israeli milita-rism also critique American militarism and human rights practices in Chinaand Saudi Arabia.”60 If only that were so. In fact, Israel is frequently sin-gled out for criticism (especially human-rights abuses) that would be—butall too often is not—much more accurately leveled at other countries.

Similarly, an article in the Harvard Crimson entitled “Protocols of theElders of Crazy” generated a slew of well-stated anti-Zionist comments.61

In response to the statement that “Jews have a right to national homeland,”a reader posted the following:

A right granted by whom exactly? Do left-handed people have a right to aleft-handed homeland? Do the people whose families lived in Palestinefor centuries have a right to continue to live there, or does the “right” of apolitical movement (Zionism) claiming falsely to represent all theworld’s Jews trump that right? Does Israel have a “right” to seize terri-tory in violation of international law and to settle it, again in violation ofinternational law, with rabidly bigoted religious extremist settlers?62

The author of this posting thus ignores the full scope of both historyand law, not only minimizing an early Jewish presence in the Holy Land,but also failing to recognize the virulent antisemitism in Arab and Islamiccountries (much like that in Christian lands) that far predated modern Zion-ism. Likewise ignored is the fact that today’s Palestinians seek a homelandthat is completely free of Jews.63

On the other hand, words (especially when coupled with action/initia-tive) can have a positive effect as well.64

60. Katz, “Antisemitism Thrives.” A more intelligent comment to the same arti-cle, also in Katz: “Let’s concede the fact Israel is threatened daily with a call forcomplete extermination and by terrorist acts from groups like Hamas who havesworn to continue their ‘jihad-like movement until the liberation of Jerusalem.’Let’s also concede that there are many, many Palestinians who just want to live inpeace. Acknowledging both the positive and negative actions taken on all sides isabsolutely essential to finding a solution.”

61. Eric T. Justin, “Protocols of the Elders of Crazy,” Harvard Crimson,October 3, 2011, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2011/10/3/arab-world-antisemitism-jews/.

62. Justin, “Protocols.”63. See, e.g., “66% of Palestinians Want Israel Destroyed,” The Student Room,

August 3, 2011, http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/show/thread.php?t=1727117;http://www.thejc.com/print/56021.

64. For example, Kasim Halfeez, an Arab schooled in hatred of Israel, changedhis views after reading a book by Alan Dershowitz entitled The Case for Israel.Halfeez explains: “As I read Dershowitz’s systematic deconstruction of the lies I


ANTISEMITISM IN THE CLASSROOM

All too often, antisemitism in the academy goes beyond the studentbody and emanates from faculty. From behind their lecterns or under thecover of published scholarship, statements that in other venues would beconsidered unacceptable bigotry are viewed in the Ivory Tower as part ofhonest debate in a respectable “marketplace of ideas.”65

Leonard Jeffries, former head of the Black Studies Department at theCity College of New York (CCNY), began teaching in 1972, but did notcome to national attention until several decades later, when it was reportedhe was telling his students that the “rich Jews who financed the develop-ment of Europe also financed the slave trade.”66 More notoriety ensued in1991, following a speech Jeffries gave at the Empire State Black Arts andCultural Festival in Albany, where he reiterated his claim that wealthy Jewsenabled the slave trade, adding that they also control the film industry,which paints blacks in a brutally negative stereotype.67 He also attackedDiane Ravitch, then the assistant U.S. secretary of education and a whiteJewish member of the task force—formed to combat racism in the publicschool curriculum and upon which he also sat—calling her as a “sophisti-cated Texas Jew,” “a debonair racist,” and “Miss Daisy.”68 In October1995, Jeffries was a featured speaker at the Black Holocaust Nationhood

had been told, I felt a real crisis of conscience. I couldn’t disprove his arguments orfind facts to respond to them with. I didn’t know what to believe. I’d blindly fol-lowed for so long, yet here I was questioning whether I had been wrong?” Halfeezdecided to visit Israel “to find the truth.” He found himself “confronted by syna-gogues, mosques and churches, by Jews and Arabs living together, by minoritiesplaying huge parts in all areas of Israeli life, from the military to the judiciary. Itwas shocking and eye-opening. This wasn’t the evil Zionist Israel that I had beentold about” (Kasim Halfeez, “From Antisemite to Zionist,” The Jewish Chronicle,October 7, 2011). His conclusion: to let Israel’s history speak for itself. “Instead ofmeekly trying to avoid coming across as too pro-Israeli or too Zionist, it is time tomake the facts known, to defend Israel against delegitimisation. It is time to stemthe tide of Israel bashing before it becomes even more mainstream and consumeseven more people like me” (Halfeez, “From Antisemite”).

65. Natan Sharansky (see note 1) has astutely pointed out that “in the academicworld, it is the faculty who remain active for decades, disseminating their warpedperspective on Israel and the Middle East conflict, while students come and goevery few years.” See also Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate (note 24).

66. The comment was reported in The New York Times.67. Lionel Jeffries, “Our Sacred Mission,” speech given at the Empire State

Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York, July 20, 1991, http://www.archive.org/details/OurSacredMission.

68. Jeffries, “Our Sacred Mission.”


Conference held in Washington D.C., a group that is commonly recognizedas both anti-white and antisemitic. Jeffries still teaches at CCNY as a ten-ured professor, and still speaks at colleges and universities.69

At the elite all-women Wellesley College in Massachusetts, a strictquota on the number of Jews admitted was in place through the 1960s.Requests by Jewish students to postpone examinations on Yom Kippurwere routinely denied, as were bids for tenure by religiously observant Jew-ish faculty.

Before he retired in 2007, Anthony Martin was a tenured professor inthe African Studies Department of Wellesley College. He came to nationalprominence in 1993, when it became known that he required students topurchase the Nation of Islam book, The Secret Relationship Between Blacksand Jews, for one of his courses. An anonymously written conspiracy the-ory, the book described an overwhelming Jewish domination of the Atlanticslave trade—contradicting the weight of historical evidence, which indi-cates that Jews played a very minor role.70

In response to the controversy that ensued, Martin gave two speechesto the Wellesley College Academic Council in March of 1993, where heagain asserted Jewish control over the Atlantic slave trade and made numer-ous new accusations: that Jews controlled the civil rights movement to thedetriment of African-Americans; that Jewish-owned publishing companiesconspired with Jewish academics to control African-American scholarship

69. Jeffries’ newfound notoriety was uncomfortable for City College, whichreduced his term as head of the African-American Studies from three years to oneand sought to remove him from the department. Jeffries sued the school. A federaljury found that his First Amendment rights had been violated, and he was restoredas chairman and awarded $400,000 in damages. On appeal, the federal appealscourt upheld the verdict, but removed the damages. One month later, however, theU.S. Supreme Court ruled in another case, Waters v. Churchill, that a governmentagency may punish an employee for speech if the agency shows “reasonable pre-dictions of disruption.” 114 S.Ct. 1878, 511 U.S. 661 (1994). Using this new deci-sion, the New York State attorney general, G. Oliver Koppell, appealed Jeffries’case to the Supreme Court. In November 1994, the high court ordered the court ofappeals to reconsider its findings; it did so in April 1995, when it reversed itsearlier decision, upholding the dismissal. See also Jeffries v. Harleston, F.3d 9 (2ndCir. 1995) and Richard Bernstein, “Judge Reinstates Jeffries as Head of BlackStudies for City College,” The New York Times, May 12, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/08/05/nyregion/judge-reinstates-jeffries-as-head-of-black-studies-for-city-college.html.

70. See Jerrold Auerbach, “Wellesley College: Antisemitism with WhiteGloves,” in the ADL Report, “Eminent Scholars on ‘The Secret Relationship,’ ” inPollack, Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present (note 7).


and culture; and that Jews were presently engaged in a racist offensiveagainst black progress.71

In a self-published book (The Jewish Onslaught: Dispatches from theWellesley Battlefront), Martin describes a conspiracy against him by theschool, three Jewish students who attended his class, and the ADL. Thepresident of Wellesley College, Diane Chapman Walsh, wrote to alumniand parents to denounce Martin’s book for its application of racial andreligious stereotypes. More than half of the faculty signed a similar state-ment of repudiation.72

Perhaps it is a perverse but inevitable irony that Israel itself has itsshare of anti-Zionist academics. Antisemitism in the academy surprisinglycomes also from Jewish scholars and intellectuals, sending an equallystrong message to Jewish students, especially those on historically Jewishcampuses.

In recent years, the late Hebrew University professor Yeshayahu Leib-owitz called his country a “Judeo-Nazi state.”73 Moshe Zimmerman, direc-tor of the Minerva Center for German History at the Hebrew Universityechoed that sentiment, claiming that an “entire sector in the Jewish public”can be equated to “German Nazis,” and that Hitler did not intend to kill theJews, but to “raise the question of the Jews.”74 Yitzhak Laor, an Israelipoet, author, and journalist, wrote a play, Ephraim Returns to the Army,which drew parallels between the Israeli occupation of the West Bank andthe Nazi occupation of Europe.75

One of the most outspoken critics of Israel has been Ilan Pappe, for-merly a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984-2007), and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and IsraeliStudies in Haifa (2000-2008). Before he left Israel in 2008, he had beenformally censured by the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.76

71. The first speech was called “An Answer to My Jewish Critics”; the secondspeech was called “Broadside No. 1.” Auerbach, “Wellesley College.”

72. Although the college did not officially censure Martin and his tenureremained unaffected, in the summer of 1994 he was denied a merit raise because ofhis writings, and the history department dropped his courses from its catalogue.Auerbach, “Wellesley College.”

73. Seth J. Frantzman, “Terra Incognita: Israel’s Democracy Wars,” JerusalemPost, May 4, 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=174680. See also Steven Plaut, “Israel’s Tenured Extremists,” The Middle EastQuarterly, Fall 2011.

74. Frantzman, “Terra Incognita.”75. Frantzman, “Terra Incognita.”76. Pappe’s scholarship has also come under attack. See “Ilan Pappe, Check

Your Sources,” CAMERA, November 4, 2011, http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x


ANTISEMITISM OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM

Outside the classroom, anti-Zionist groups often hold rallies andscreen films that portray Israel in the harshest of terms, and disrupt pro-Israel events. Jewish students increasingly find it challenging, if not fright-ening, to show their support for Israel.77

In November 1993, Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a spokesman for LouisFarrakahn’s Nation of Islam, gave a lengthy speech at Kean College in NewJersey in which he demonized Jews, declaring that they were to blame forthe Holocaust because they took over Germany’s financial infrastructure,and were still “sucking our blood on a daily and consistent basis.”78

At the same event, Muhammad also sought to justify the Holocaust:

[E]verybody always talk about Hitler exterminating 6 million Jews. . . .But don’t nobody ever asked what did they do to Hitler? What did theydo to them folks? They went in there, in Germany, the way they do eve-rywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped, they turned aroundand a German, in his own country, would almost have to go to a Jew toget money. They had undermined the very fabric of the society.79

Muhammad proceeded to instruct all whites to leave South Africa with24 hours, or risk being killed.80

Kean College’s response was both weak and belated. Eleven days afterthe speech, its president, Elsa Gomez, issued a statement that did not men-tion Muhammad by name, nor address antisemitism. Instead, she reiteratedthe school’s firm support of free speech and freedom of dissent.81

_context=8&x_nameinnews=122&x_article=2145. Called Israel’s most contentious“new historian,” Pappe left his job as senior lecturer in political science at theUniversity of Haifa after he endorsed the international academic boycott of Israeliinstitutions, provoking the university president to call for his resignation. SeeTamar Traubman, “Haifa University President Calls on Dissident Academic toResign,” Ha’aretz, April 6, 2005.

77. Charles Jacobs, “Rampant Anti-Semitism on American Campuses,” TheJewish Advocate, February 28, 2011.

78. “Who is it sucking our blood in the Black community? A white imposterArab and a white imposter Jew.” Muhammad was brought to campus by a blackstudent organization; he was paid by student activity funds. See generally KhalidAbdul Muhammad, Jewish Virtual Library, http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/anti-semitism/Khalid.html.

79. Muhammad, Jewish Virtual Library.80. Muhammad, Jewish Virtual LIbrary.81. Vern E. Smith and Sarah Van Boven, “The Itinerant Incendiary,” News-

week, September 14, 1998, http://www.newsweek.com/id/113381.


Muhammad went on to give similar talks at Howard University, wherehe called Jews “no-good, dirty, low-down bastards” and declared that hewas not impressed by the “pile of shoes” at the U.S. Holocaust MemorialMuseum; and at San Francisco State University, where he denied the Holo-caust, and claimed that Jews control the U.S. government.82

On occasion, there is more antipathy toward Israel on American cam-puses than within the Palestinian territories themselves. This appeared to bethe case in March 2009, when an Arab-Israeli journalist named Khaled AbuToameh toured the United States in an effort to promote peaceful dialogueabout the Middle East conflict. He was often confronted by hostile audi-ences, who told him that Israel has no right to exist, that its “apartheidsystem” is worse than the one that existed in South Africa, and that Opera-tion Cast Lead was launched not in response to four years of incessantrocket fire launched at Israeli communities like Sderot, but because Hamaswas beginning to show signs that it was interested in making peace.Toameh was further informed that all the reports of financial corruption inthe Palestinian Authority was “Zionist propaganda,” and that Yasser Arafathad done wonderful things for his people, including the establishment ofschools, hospitals, and universities.83

Toameh concluded that what is happening on U.S. campuses is lessabout supporting the Palestinians as much as it is about promoting hatredfor the Jewish state—that it is not about ending the “occupation” but aboutending the existence of Israel.84

82. “ADL Alerts Nation’s Academic Leadership About Virus of Bigotry BeingSpread by Kahlid Abdul Muhammad,” July 1, 1997, http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASUS_12/3005_12.asp.

83. Khaled Abu Toameh, “On Campus: The Pro-Palestinians’ Real Agenda,”Hudson Institute/New York, March 25, 2009, http://www.hudsonny.org/2009/03/on-campus-the-pro-palestinians-real-agenda.php.

84. Toameh said that he regarded his hecklers as “hard-line activists/thugs” whowould intimidate anyone who dared say something with which they disagreed:

If these folks really cared about the Palestinians, they would becampaigning for good government and for the promotion of values ofdemocracy and freedom in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Their hatredfor Israel and what it stands for has blinded them to a point where theyno longer care about the real interests of the Palestinians, namely theneed to end the anarchy and lawlessness, and to dismantle all the armedgangs that are responsible for the death of hundreds of innocent Pales-tinians over the past few years. The majority of these activists openlyadmit that they have never visited Israel or the Palestinian territories.They don’t know—and don’t want to know—that Jews and Arabs hereare still doing business together and studying together and meeting witheach other on a daily basis because they are destined to live together in


Similarly, Noam Bedein, an Israeli photojournalist who regularly toursAmerican campuses, reported that he had been subjected to a barrage ofinsulting signs and posters, as well as a by a large group of anti-Israelprotesters. “The shock came after they uploaded a video of my speech andthe protests against me to YouTube. They edited the video to make me looklike a demon. . . . [T]his is the first time I have ever experienced anti-Semitism, of a particularly nasty, medieval sort, in which Jews are identi-fied with demons and Satan.” Bedein added his view that there are so manyanti-Zionist activities on campus today that supporters of Israel are worndown, “afraid to present even the most basic humanitarian facts about ourside of the story.”85

A large part of the anti-Israel lobbying taking place on American cam-puses is funded by an Iranian front organization, the Alavi Foundation,which makes ample use of pro-Iranian anti-Zionist professors. For example,hundreds of thousands of dollars have been donated to the Middle East andPersian Studies programs at Columbia University and Rutgers, for coursestaught by academics who openly express sympathy for the terrorist groupsHezbollah and Hamas. The Alavi Foundation donated $100,000 to Colum-bia University in 2007 after that institution agreed to host Iranian presidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad, who frequently denies the Holocaust and ques-tions Israel’s legitimacy as a state.86

The Center for Intelligence and Security Studies at Britain’s BrunelUniversity reported that up to 48 British universities have been infiltratedby Muslim fundamentalists, all heavily financed by major Muslim groups,at a cost of more than one quarter billion Sterling.87

A recent report by the Reut Institute, a Tel Aviv-based national secur-ity and socioeconomic policy think tank, describes a new battlefield it calls“Hubs of Delegitmization,” in which Israel finds the legitimacy of its exis-tence attacked by a wide array of organizations and individuals—many of

this part of the world. They don’t want to hear that despite all theproblems life continues and that ordinary Arab and Jewish parents whowake up in the morning just want to send their children to school andgo to work before returning home safely and happily.” (Khaled AbuToameh, “On Campus”)

85. Samuel L. Blumenfeld, “Anti-Semitism on American Campuses,” The NewAmerican, November 18, 2010.

86. Some $650 million of the Alavi Foundation was seized by U.S. federal lawenforcement. Malkah Fleisher, “US Colleges Teach Anti-Israel, Pro-Iran CoursesThanks to Alavi,” Israel National News, November 24, 2009, www.IsraelNationalNews.com /News/News.aspx/134601 (quoting news reports by the New York Postand New York Times).

87. Fleisher, “US Colleges Teach.”


them academic—in London, Toronto, Brussels, Madrid, and Berkeley. Thenew front focuses its attack on Israel’s political legitimacy, painting it as apariah state and mobilizing its Arab minority to engage in the struggle.88

Reut’s report distinguishes between “soft critics” of Israel and “hard-core delegitimizers,” the latter consisting of anti-Zionists, antisemites, andradical Islamists, whose goal is to blur any distinction between intellectu-ally honest criticism of Israeli policy and the Jewish State’s basiclegitimacy.89

The report suggests that Israel’s traditional enemies have increasinglybeen joined in battle by widespread networks of anti-Zionist groups, includ-ing hostile human-rights organizations and homegrown radical Islamists,who, in the process of demonizing Israel, employ cultural, academic, legal,and financial weapons against it. The groups support an “all-or-nothing”dynamic, in which boycotts are presented as the only option.90

In March 2010, Jessica Felber, a Jewish undergraduate at the Univer-sity of California Berkeley, was holding a placard bearing the words “IsraelWants Peace” when she was physically attacked by a leader of Students forJustice in Palestine (SJP). What made this case different is that Felberfought back, charging in a federal lawsuit that “physical intimidation andviolence were frequently employed as a tactic by SJP and other campusgroups in an effort to silence students on campus who support Israel,” andthat the administration of UC Berkeley possessed substantial evidence ofanti-Jewish animus and should be held liable for the injuries she suffered.91

At the University of California Santa Cruz, lecturer Tammi Rossman-Benjamin made a similar case against her own employer. For several years,she had spoken out against antisemitism and anti-Zionism on her campus,describing an atmosphere at Santa Cruz in which taxpayer-supported, uni-versity-sponsored discourse “demonizes Israel, compares contemporaryIsraeli policy to that of the Nazis, calls for the dismantling of the JewishState, and holds Israel to an impossible double standard.” Like Felber,Rossman-Benjamin also filed a civil rights action with the U.S. Departmentof Education’s powerful Office for Civil Rights, arguing that UCSC hadcreated a hostile environment for Jewish students.92

88. Amir Mizroch, “Study Surveys ‘Hubs of Delegitimization’ Where Israel IsUnder Heaviest Attack,” Jerusalem Post, December 25, 2009.

89. Mizroch, “Study Surveys ‘Hubs.’ ”90. Mizroch, “Study Surveys ‘Hubs.’ ”91. Kenneth L. Marcus, “Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism,” Jewish

Ideas Daily, March 8, 2011.92. Marcus, “Fighting Back.” (“OCR sent a powerful signal to academia when

it informed Rossman-Benjamin that it is formally opening an investigation of her


Antisemitic activity on campuses continued in 2010 and 2011. In April2010, at Carleton University, a (non-Jewish) supporter of Israel and hisIsraeli roommate were attacked by an Arab-speaking mob, one of whomwielded a machete.93

At Amherst in the fall semester of 2010, a pro-Israel female studentwas repeatedly harassed by masked individuals calling them “baby killers,”“genocide lovers,” “apartheid supporters,” and “racist.” After receiving ane-mail that read “Make the world a better place and die slow,” she movedoff the campus. She is still afraid to disclose her identity.94

At Indiana University in November 2010, five incidents of anti-Jewishvandalism were reported in one week, including rocks thrown at Chabadand Hillel; sacred Jewish texts were placed in restrooms and defiled, and aJewish Studies bulletin board was vandalized.95

In January 2011, Rutgers University hosted an event that likenedPalestinians to victims of the Holocaust. The program had been advertisedas free and open to the public; Palestinian supporters were let in withoutcharge. The university, however, required a group of pro-Israel students andHolocaust survivors to pay an entrance fee.96

One might reasonably ask, what would have happened on campus, inthe media, or in the community if these incidents had been directed at Afri-can American, Hispanic, or Muslim students? The answer might be sug-gested by actual events. In October 2009, a noose was found at theUniversity of California San Diego library. Students occupied the chancel-lor’s office. The governor, the chancellor, and student leaders condemnedthe incident. The university established a task force on minority facultyrecruitment and a commission to address declining African-Americanenrollment, and vowed to find space for an African-American resourcecenter.97

claims.”) See also Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Academics Against Israel,” Ynet News,September 14, 2011, http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/11691.

93. See students-attacked-with-machete-at-carleton-university/.94. “Monumental Jewish Failure: Ceding the Campus and Abandoning Our Stu-

dents,” Talking Tachlis, February 25, 2011, http://talkingtachlis.blogspot.com/2011/02/monumental-jewish-failure-ceding-campus.html.

95. “Campus, Community Respond to Recent Antisemitic Incidents,” The Col-lege Magazine, Fall 2010, http://college.indiana.edu/magazine/fall2010/incidents.shtml.

96. Alyssa Farrah, “Rutgers Bars Jews from Anti-Zionist Gathering,” WorldNetDaily, January 29, 2011.

97. A few weeks later it was discovered that the noose had been planted by aminority student. Jacobs, “Rampant Anti-Semitism” (note 77).


ACADEMIC BOYCOTTS OF ISRAEL

The idea of an academic boycott against Israel was born in Great Brit-ain, whose largest faculty association has voted several times in the pastfive years to encourage a boycott of Israeli universities and professors overwhat it views as Israel’s “apartheid” policies toward Palestinians—advocat-ing that union members refuse to cooperate with Israeli academics who donot “disassociate themselves from such policies.”98

These boycotts likewise have antecedents in Nazi Germany. DuringHitler’s rise to power, some of his staunchest supporters were universityprofessors—many of whom were drawn into the higher echelons of theNazi party and participated in its more gruesome excesses. Mussolini alsohad a large following of intellectuals, and not all of them Italian. So didStalin, as well as such postwar dictators as Castro, Nasser, and Mao tze-tung.99

The current campaign against Israeli scholars began in Great Britain alittle more than eight years ago. Its specific goals were to inhibit Israelischolars from obtaining grants; to persuade other academic institutions tosever relations with Israeli universities and faculty; to convince academicsnot to visit Israel while simultaneously not inviting Israelis to internationalconferences; to prevent the publication of articles from Israeli scholars andto refuse to review their work; to deny recommendations to students whowish to study in Israel; to promote divestment of Israeli securities or thoseof American suppliers of weapons to Israel by university foundations; andto expel Jewish organizations from campus.100

Well over 700 academics ultimately signed the boycott petition—mostof them British, but a considerable number of scholars hailed from a host ofother European countries as well.101

In 2009, following Israel’s military campaign into Gaza to stop Hamasrocket fire that had barraged the country for six years, a group of American

98. “Israel Apartheid Weeks” have been celebrated worldwide every year since2005. See http://apartheidweek.org/en/history; on occasion, politicians state theiropposition to independent pro-Israel activists do not form the sole source of opposi-tion to the “Israeli Apartheid Week” movement. On February 25, 2010, Membersof Provincial Parliament (MPPs) of varying political ideologies in Ontario collec-tively and unanimously condemned “Israeli Apartheid Week.”

99. See, e.g., A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 2004).

100. Douglas Davis, “Fears Voiced that Academic Boycott of Israel CouldEndanger Lives,” Jerusalem Post, December 15, 2002.

101. Bill L. Turpen, “Reflections on the Academic Boycott Against Israel,”Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, March 1, 2003, 58.


professors joined the call for an academic boycott. The group recommendeddivestment initiatives modeled on those used against apartheid SouthAfrica. “As educators of conscience, we have been unable to stand by andwatch in silence Israel’s indiscriminate assault on the Gaza Strip and itseducational institutions,” declared the U.S. Campaign for the Academic andCultural Boycott of Israel. According to David Lloyd, a professor ofEnglish at the University of Southern California, the initiative was“impelled by Israel’s latest brutal assault on Gaza and by our determinationto say enough is enough.” The statement was a response to what it calledthe “censorship and silencing of the Palestine question in U.S. universities,as well as U.S. society at large,” he added. “The response has been remark-able, given the extraordinary hold that lobbying organizations like AIPACexert over U.S. politics and over the U.S. media, and in particular given thecampaign of intimidation that has been leveled at academics who dare tocriticize Israel’s policies.”102

Can it be true that anti-Zionist professors tremble in fear when theycriticize Israel? “Not likely,” says Alan Dershowitz of Harvard, “if youhave any sense of what’s going on on college campuses today, where Israel-bashing is rampant among hard left faculty and students.” At ColumbiaUniversity, a group of professors sought to rebuke Columbia’s president,Lee C. Bollinger, for expressing his personal views about the Iranian dicta-tor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They also want to muzzle students and alumniwho have legitimate complaints about the Middle East Studies Department,which broadly reflects the political views of radical Islam.103

Ahmadinejad’s comment is reminiscent of that made long ago by theanti-Zionist historian Arnold Toynbee, who declared that the displacementof the Arabs was an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis.104

The formula is clear: if you’re against Israel, you should have com-plete freedom to speak your mind; if you’re not, you should be stifled. Evenat Harvard and Columbia, the First Amendment means “free speech for me,but not for thee!”105

To be sure, there have been swift condemnations of the academic andscientific boycotts against Israel—most notably by the former president of

102. Raphael Ahren, “For First Time, U.S. Professors Call for Academic andCultural Boycott of Israel,” Ha’aretz, January 29, 2009. See also Mission State-ment, “U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel,” http://www.usacbi.org/mission-statement/.

103. See Alan Dershowitz, “Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee!,” HuffingtonPost, November 27, 2007.

104. See Eric Hoffer, “Israel’s Peculiar Position,” Los Angeles Times, May 26,1968, http://www.factsandlogic.org/outstanding_hoffer.html

105. Dershowitz, “Free Speech.”


Harvard, Lawrence Summers; by Judith Rodin, president of the Universityof Pennsylvania; and by Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University.All of them pointed out that many countries involved in the current MiddleEast disputes have been aggressors, and calls for divestment against themhave been notably absent.106

But no presidential statements have been able to quash anti-Israel fac-ulties, protected as they are by academic freedom and tenure. On some cam-puses, the driving force behind the academic boycotts are Arabist professorswho seek to prosecute the war against Israel as a way of diverting attentionaway from corrupt regimes. In the academic world, the radical agenda issupported by faculties in mid-Eastern and Islamic studies. Antisemitic state-ments emanate from prominent academics.

Columbia University has had its share of problems in this regard.There have been numerous reports of intimidation and hostility by facultymembers in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cul-tures—at least part of whose funding comes from the United Arab Emir-ates. In one incident, Professor Joseph Massad demanded of an Israelistudent, “How many Palestinians have you killed?”107 He told a class that“the Palestinian is the new Jew, and the Jew is the new Nazi.”108 Accordingto another account, he repeated twenty-four times in one half-hour periodthat “Israel is a racist Jewish apartheid oppressive state,” and he allegedlyyelled at a Jewish student, “I will not have anybody here deny Israeli atroci-ties.”109 More than one-third of Columbia’s Middle East Department signeda petition for the university to divest its holdings in companies doing busi-ness with Israel. The chairman of the department, Hamid Dabashi, openlytalks about Israel’s “brutal massacres” of innocent Palestinians.110

In 2005, the academic boycotts were pressed anew in Great Britain andelsewhere. Despite the fact that Great Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Jonathan

106. Lawrence H. Summers, “Address at Morning Prayers,” http:// www.ajc.org,September 17, 2002, 22. See also Edward Alexander, “Pushing Divestment onAmerican Campuses,” Jerusalem Post, May 12, 2004, 13. In November 2002, sev-enty U.S. medical professors, of whom twelve were from Harvard, held an interna-tional conference in Jerusalem to protest the divestment campaign and other anti-Israel activities on American campuses. Judy Siegel-Itzkovich, “70 MedicalProfessors Coming to Protest Divestment,”Jerusalem Post, November 18, 2002.

107. Editorial, New York Sun, December 10, 2004, 14.108. Eric J. Greenberg, “Jewish Students Accuse Columbia University of Bias,”

The Jewish Daily Forward, October 29. 2004.109. Uriel Heilman, “Columbia to Review Antisemitism Charges,” Jerusalem

Post, December 8, 2004.110. See “A Not So Academic Debate,” Notebook, The New Republic, January

24, 2005, 8.


Sacks, had been told privately (in 2002) by Prime Minister Tony Blair thatthe British government would not tolerate a boycott of Israel, the universityestablishment there and here has plodded on in that direction.111

Meanwhile, a “silent boycott” is already well in place. In 2006, forexample, Bar-Ilan University made public a letter in which a British profes-sor refused to write for an Israeli academic journal because of what hecalled the “brutal and illegal expansionism and the slow-motion ethniccleansing” of the Israeli government.112

Could it be possible that the true motivation behind the boycott cam-paigns against Israel is anti-Zionism, which—as many point out—is arazor-thin line away from antisemitism?

ISRAEL AS AN “APARTHEID STATE”

As noted earlier, “Israel Apartheid Weeks” have been celebrated everyyear since 2006, and in growing numbers.113 The aim of such events,according to their organizers, is “to contribute to this chorus of internationalopposition to Israeli apartheid . . . [and] an end to the occupation and colo-nization of all Arab lands—including the Golan Heights, the OccupiedWest Bank with East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip—and dismantling theWall and protecting Palestinian refugees’ right to return to their homes andproperties.”114

Academics worldwide are quick to join such demonstrations, whichoften end up demonizing what they call the “Jewish apartheid” state, liken-ing Israel to segregated South Africa during the latter part of the twentiethcentury. The truth is that Israel is a democratic state; its 20% Arab minorityenjoys all the political, economic, and religious rights and freedoms of citi-zenship—including electing members of their choice to the Knesset. Instark contradistinction to apartheid South Africa, both Israeli Arabs andPalestinians have standing before Israel’s Supreme Court. (In contrast, noJew may own property in Jordan, and neither Christian nor Jew can visitIslam’s holiest sites in Saudi Arabia.)115

111. Francis Elliott and Catherine Milner, “Blair Vows to End Dons’ Boycott ofIsraeli Scholars,” The Daily Telegraph, November 17, 2002.

112. See Phyllis Chesler, “Ivory Tower Fascists,” National Review, May 30,2006, http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/176/ivory-tower-fascists.

113. See note 98 and accompanying text.114. See note 98 and accompanying text.115. See “2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel Lies,” Simon Wiesenthal Center,

www.wiesenthal.com/toptenlies. See also Richard Goldstone, “Israel and theApartheid Slander,” The New York Times, October 31, 2001.


Even those who regularly criticize Israel, like Michael Ignatieff (theintellectual leader of Canada’s Liberal Party), are uneasy with such events.“The activities planned for this week will single out Jewish and Israeli stu-dents. They will be made to feel ostracized and even physically threatenedin the very place where freedom should be paramount—on a universitycampus.”116

What can one say about the comparisons made between modern Israeland the apartheid South Africa of the late twentieth century? The funda-mental differences between the two are clear and factual, and should gowithout saying, but many distortions of Israeli-Arab realities are promul-gated by the Palestinians and perpetuated in the media. Although academicboycotts were virtually unknown before the days of apartheid in SouthAfrica—where they were used largely at the behest of that country’s ownscholars as a pressure tactic against the minority white government—therewas never an attempt to cut off all South African academics from interna-tional discourse with their peers.

In the process of the campaign to compare Israel with apartheid SouthAfrica, short shrift is given to certain incontrovertible facts:

• Israel’s Declaration of Independence (1948) declared that the state“will ensure equality of social and political rights to all its inhabi-tants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”117

• Israeli Arabs attend and lecture in every Israeli university. Moreo-ver, an overwhelming majority of Israeli Arabs consistently statethat they’d prefer to remain in Israel rather than join a future Pales-tinian state.

• Israeli Arabs serve in the Knesset (currently eleven in all, includingtwo in the dominant Likud party), and can serve in the army if theywish. An Arab justice (Salim Joubran) holds a seat on Israel’sSupreme Court. Israel even opens diplomatic positions to IsraeliArabs, who have held posts in the United States, South America,Finland, and elsewhere.118

Needless to say, no such exercises in democracy occurred in apartheidSouth Africa. Yet, Israel is singled out, while there is no call for a boycottagainst academics in China, Russia, Sudan, Congo, Zimbabwe, and North

116. Israel Resource Review, May 2, 2010, http://www.israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=3972&q=1.

117. The Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, May 14, 1948.118. “Distorting Israeli Arab Reality,” HonestReporting, May 18, 2005, http://

www.honestreporting.com/SSI/main/send2friend.asp?site=www.honestreporting.com&title=distorting%20Israeli%20Arab%20Reality&url=distorting_Israeli_Arab_Reality.asp.


Korea—all of which oppress academics far more than Israel ever has. Whyare there no boycotts of Muslim countries, where academic freedom eitherdoesn’t exist or is under constant attack, such as Syria, Egypt, Iran, andSaudi Arabia? Is the answer that the boycotters’ true goal is the eliminationof Israel, which they condemn as a “colonial apartheid state, more insidiousthan South Africa”?119

No one has proposed that Chinese scholars be boycotted over whattheir government does to the Tibetans, or Russian scholars for their actionsagainst Chechnya, or Indonesians for their treatment of civilians in EastTimor. Indeed, a number of other countries today—including China, Rus-sia, Turkey, Iraq, Spain, even France—control disputed land and rule overpeople who seek independence. Those pushing for academic boycottsagainst Israel might be asked why, since 1948, the United Nations haspassed many hundreds of resolutions censuring Israel—but not a single onecondemning known terrorist organizations or states.120

Other countries, in fact, have treated Arabs more harshly: Jordan killedmore Palestinians in one single month (an estimated four thousand, in Sep-tember 1970) than Israel ever has; Kuwait expelled 300,000 Palestiniansduring the Persian Gulf War.121

Today in Mauritania, some 90,000 slaves serve the ruling class. InSudan, Arab northerners raid southern villages, killing the men and takingthe women and children to be auctioned off and sold into slavery. These areverifiable facts, yet there was no academic outcry against slavery in 2007.

Nor have there been any academic protestations of note against blatantapartheid in Saudi Arabia—our erstwhile ally—which severely limits therights of women, Christians, Jews, and Hindus. On the other hand, diversityon campus remains an illusory concept. In practice, intellectual contentionis often drowned out in a sea of false emotion; members of designated vic-tim groups respond to a serious argument with “pain” and “shock” and

119. “British Professors Ban Israeli Universities,” Israel Insider, April 25, 2005,http://web.israelinsider.com/Articles/AntiSemi/5375.htm. See also Goldstone,“Israel and” (note 115).

120. One glaring example is UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, urging theelimination of Zionism, declaring it “a form of racism and racial discrimination.”UN General Assembly Resolution A/RES/3379, November 10, 1975.

121. On the other hand, no Arab country has contributed to the Palestinians’humanitarian needs nearly as much as have their primary benefactors, the UnitedStates and Israel. See “Thirty Trucks Loaded with Food Enter the Gaza Strip,”Infopod, Global News Wire, March 12, 2003. In addition, three truckloads ofmedicine and medical supplies entered the West Bank; eighteen permits for thepurpose of improving medical service in Israel and the Palestinian territories wereissued.


accusations of “hate,” and university administrators make a show of pre-tending to care—the very kind of emotional frenzy that is inimical to thespirit of rational inquiry universities are supposed to encourage.122

In April 2010, Brandeis University (the only Jewish-sponsored, non-sectarian university in America) announced that it had invited Israeliambassador Michael Oren to deliver the forthcoming commencementaddress. Critics called him an “inappropriate choice for keynote speaker,”arguing that Oren’s presence would transform the commencement ceremo-nies into a “politically polarizing event.” A student group demanded thatOren be disinvited, claiming that his presence would suggest that Brandeisis affiliating itself with “a rogue state apologist, a defender of—amongother things—the war crimes and human rights abuses of the war onGaza.”123

Few if any academics defended Oren primarily on First Amendmentgrounds—i.e., that repressing pro-Israel advocates is wrong if only becausedoing so is an assault on freedom of speech—although some students didtake that position.124

DIVESTMENT CAMPAIGNS

A newer incarnation of the anti-Israel boycott is the university divest-ment campaign—similar to the one directed at the apartheid regime inSouth Africa during the late twentieth century—demanding that universitiesdivest from companies that do business with Israel.

Here again the Big Lie comes into play.Each of the various arguments put forth to justify divestment—that

Israel is responsible for the “humanitarian catastrophe” in Gaza, that it is“Judaizing” the Holy City of Jerusalem, that its policies endanger U.S.troops in Afghanistan and Iraq—are but preludes to others—that the onlyhope for peace in the Middle East is a single, binational state, and that Israel

122. James Taranto, “The Diversity Sham,” The Wall Street Journal, November18, 2009.

123. Brandeis sociology professor Gordon Fellman contended that “[h]is roleobligates him to defend Israeli policies.” Josh Nathan-Kazis, “Oren Speaking atBrandeis Creates a Commencement Controversy,” The Jewish Daily Forward, May7, 2010, http://www.forward.com/articles/127613/.

124. A blogger using the name “Rabbi Tony Jutner” claimed that a student refer-endum would soon formally call on Brandeis to bar all faculty from collaboratingwith Israeli scholars, and that Brandeis will “play a key role in the US-Iranianrapprochement by inviting high-ranking officials of the Iranian RevolutionaryGuard to campus.” The rabbi also contends that the majority of Brandeis studentsfind the concept of a Jewish state offensive. Nathan-Kazis, “Oren, Speaking.”


itself is the root cause of worldwide antisemitism. All these arguments areeasily refuted by reference to history and facts on the ground.125

A University of California Berkeley group calling itself “Students forJustice in Palestine” was the first to launch an organized divestment cam-paign. Since then, many campuses have followed suit. At least two majoruniversities—California and Michigan—have hosted divestment confer-ences. The faculties at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technologylaunched an ongoing divestment campaign in the spring of 2002.126

In early 2010, the student government at UC Berkeley passed severalanti-Israel resolutions. The first, in February, voiced opposition to academicsanctions against students who disrupted Israeli ambassador Michael Oren’sspeech on its campus.127 The second, in March, would have required theschool to divest from corporations deemed supportive of the Israeli military,the West Bank separation barrier, and settlement building—namely, Gen-eral Electric and United Technologies—“because of their military supportof the occupation of the Palestinian territories.”128

That same month, at the Oxford (England) Student Union, Israeli dep-uty foreign minister Danny Ayalon’s speech was interrupted by a group ofdemonstrators carrying Palestinian flags, and chanting “war criminal” and“Slaughter the Jews!”129

125. See note 118 and accompanying text.126. See “Report of the Third North American Conference of the Palestine Soli-

darity Movement,” Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey, October 10-12, 2003, http://www.divestmentconference.com. See also Richard Lacayo, “ACampus War over Israel,” Time, October 7, 2002, 63.

127. Josh Nathan-Kazis, “At Berkeley, Divestment Vote Divides Students,Draws Veto,” The Jewish Daily Forward, March 25, 2010, http://www.forward.com/articles/126902/. Angered by the resolution, some Jewish students madespeeches before the student legislative council, each concluding with the question:“When will this student government stand up for me?” Nathan-Kazis, “AtBerkeley.”

128. The resolution passed 16-4. The president of the student government vetoedthe latter resolution, arguing that the comparison of the Israel/Palestine conflictwith that of South African apartheid in the 1980s “is highly contested.” The vetowas narrowly upheld in late April 2010. Similar legislation was introduced at UCSan Diego. See http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/57942/divestiture-saga-rolls-on-in-berkeley-and-now-san-diego/.

129. Jonny Paul, “At Oxford, Student Shouts ‘Kill the Jews’ at Ayalon,” http://www.jpowt.com/International/Article.aspx?id=A68275. This was hardly the firsttime that a pro-Israel speaker was hounded off a campus podium. Before hebecame president of Harvard, Laurence Summers was prevented from making aspeech to the University of California Board of Regents. Israel’s former prime min-ister Ehud Barak was prevented from speaking at Concordia University in Canada


As has been observed concerning the divestment campaign at Berke-ley, the exercise puts all other Jews on notice: either stand with the guiltyparty—i.e., Israel—or with all right-thinking people. Speaking out in oppo-sition, pointing to the explicit double standards and implicit antisemitism ofthe attackers, is routinely denounced as “censorship.”130

American universities are not yet so poisoned as are their counterpartsin Great Britain and elsewhere, just as the American people are nowherenear as antisemitic or as anti-Israel as are Europeans and others. But the gapis decreasing.131

Although some university presidents, faculty, and students have spo-ken out strongly against such divestment campaigns, it is clear that criticismof Israeli policies in mainstream academia—which one observer has calleda “bacchanal of invective”—has become much more acceptable.132 Moreo-ver, faculty members who support divestment and academic/scientific boy-cotts often chafe under the criticism that they are antisemitic.133 Jewishprofessors who condemn Israel, although relatively few in number, are anespecially troubling breed. Some draw “politically correct” inferences fromthe Holocaust—and concluding that, whatever happens in world events,Jews should always conduct themselves as humane, progressive, and peace-loving—in other words, beyond reproach.134

When viewed this way, however, they become acceptable only asvictims.

by a hard-left anti-Israel crowd of violent censors. See Dershowitz, “Free Speech”(note 103).

130. Alex Joffe, “Anti-Semitism 101,” Jewish Ideas Daily, May 6, 2011.131. Joffe, “Anti-Semitism 101.” The academic groups endorsing the Israel

Divestment Campaign (http://israeldivestmentcampiagn.org/content/endorsements/organizational.htm) is illustrative.

132. See note 3.133. A Harvard professor, for example, told a reporter that he didn’t consider

himself antisemitic at all, but that he was definitely hostile to “the aggressive eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth policies of the current Israeli leadership.” PatrickHealy, “Summers Hits ‘Antisemitic’ Actions,’ ” Boston Globe, September 20,2002, A1 (quoting Peter Ashton, a research professor of forestry).

134. Rebecca Spence, “Controversial Professor Loses Battle for Tenure,” TheJewish Daily Forward, June 15, 2007, http://www.forward.com/articles/10947/.Finkelstein’s 2005 book, Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Antisemitism and theAbuse of History, purports to pick apart Professor Alan Dershowitz’s pro-Israelbook, The Case for Israel (2003); see Healy, “Summers Hits” (note 133).


COUNTERING OTHER CANARDS

Thus it is all the more important to confront those who would singleout Israel for condemnation, and to illustrate how they are betrayed by boththeir rhetoric and actions. The Big Lies must be countered by a recitation ofthe facts, to wit:

From the Inquisition to the pogroms to the Holocaust, history hasshown that antisemitism existed long before creation of the State ofIsrael.135

The building of Jewish homes in East Jerusalem does not mean a take-over of the city. Jerusalem is a holy place to three major faiths; its diversepopulation includes a Jewish majority and Muslim and Christian minorities.When Israel took over in 1967, full freedom of religion was granted toeveryone—for the first time in modern history.136

The claim that Israel endangers American troops in Iraq or Afghani-stan is a contemporary version of the blood libel promulgated by The Proto-cols of the Elders of Zion and reiterated by renowned antisemitic figuressuch as Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin.137

So is the claim that Israel is responsible for the “humanitarian crisis”in Gaza. On this issue facts are harder to come by, but there are certainlytwo sides to be heard. According to Palestinian supporters, Gaza is animpoverished and overcrowded coastal strip of scrub desert, its people thedesperate victims of decades of war and suffering under an Israeli economicblockade that began after Hamas took over in 2005. The UN and variousinternational aid agencies assert that the blockade has led to worsening pov-erty, rising unemployment. and deteriorating public services that threatenbasic health care, water treatment, and sanitation.138

The Israeli government tends to dismiss those claims by asserting thatit permits the import of humanitarian goods but reserves the right to banproducts that can have a military use. To Israel, the Palestinian-controlledarea of sand dunes and refugee camps squeezed between southern Israel and

135. See “2010 Top Ten Anti-Israel Lies,” Wiesenthal Center (note 115).136. Muslim and Christian religious organizations control their own holy sites.

Wiesenthal Center, “2010 Top Ten.”137. Holocaust Encyclopedia, Holocaust Memorial Museum, http://www.ushmm

.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005516. Successive U.S. administrations haverecognized Israel as a major strategic asset. Wiesenthal Center, “Top Ten.”

138. UN officials have called the blockade “a collective punishment” thatamounts to a war crime. Amnesty International says it harms the most vulnerable,such as children, who make up more than half Gaza’s population, the elderly, thesick, and impoverished refugees. See Peter Goodspeed, “Policy Under Siege,”National Post, June 4, 2010.


the sea is a terror state funded by the Iranians. The fact that Gaza may beeconomically crippled is regarded as the self-inflicted byproduct of a cor-rupt regime that constantly attacks Israel with rockets and refuses to recog-nize its right to exist.139

According to a report issued in 2010 by the Israel ministry of foreignaffairs, well over a million tons of humanitarian supplies entered Gaza fromIsrael over the last 18 months—“equaling nearly a ton of aid for every man,woman and child in Gaza.” In 2009 alone, more than 738,000 tons of foodand supplies entered Gaza, the report says. Indeed, photographs in Palestin-ian newspapers show local markets filled with fruit, vegetables, cheese,spices, bread, and meat. This humanitarian conduit is used by internation-ally recognized organizations, including the United Nations and the RedCross.140

Yet in June 2010, when Israel prevented a flotilla of ships ostensiblycarrying humanitarian supplies from breaking the Mediterranean blockadeit had set up, it was roundly condemned by the international community.141

Academics added vociferously to the chorus of condemnation. “The mar-tyrs of the ships are heroes,” wrote Mark LeVine, professor of history at theUniversity of California Irvine. “They are warriors every bit as deserving ofour tears and support as the soldiers of American wars past and present.”142

Ignoring the overwhelming video and documentary evidence that ter-rorist activists had initiated the hostilities, various other professors of Mid-dle East studies lined up to denounce the Jewish State. “Those ships werejust bringing aid to impoverished Palestinians,” said New York Universityprofessor Zachary Lockman.143

Amid the cacophony of recriminations against Israel following the flo-tilla incident, the silence from the academic community was once againdeafening. While their colleagues in the humanitarian community loudlybemoaned the dire situation of the Palestinians, few bothered to point out

139. Goodspeed, “Policy.”140. Goodspeed, “Policy”; see also Kenneth Lasson, “What Else Is New?,” Balti-

more Jewish Times, June 25, 2010.141. See, e.g., Tobias Buck, “Israel Condemned after Flotilla Attack,” Financial

Times, June 1, 2010.142. See Brendan Goldman, “Middle East Studies Profs Usurp New Roles to

Censure Israel over Gaza Flotilla,” American Thinker, July 20, 2010, http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/06/middle_east_studies_profs_usur.html.

143. Professor Lockman added that “It’s not [the Palestinians’] fault they areunder Hamas rule.” Could he have forgotten that Hamas was democratically chosenby the Palestinians to lead them in January 2006? Goldman, “Middle East Studies.”


that—as the Palestinian leadership sops up Western aid dollars—Palestin-ian markets are full and bustling.144

There are, of course, other canards-camouflaged-as-fact that somehowemerge as objective reports—such as that Israel traffics in human bodyparts, or poisons Arab children, or massacres civilians, or, for that matter,whose very existence endangers American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan.

HOLOCAUST DENIAL IN THE ACADEMY

Holocaust denial as a form of antisemitism has received much medianotoriety in the United States, especially as it targets university students.145

Campus newspapers (articles, op-eds, and advertising), videotapes, DVDs,and the Internet inflame the “debate” over whether the Holocaust happened.Under the guise of academic scholarship, and often in an attempt to gainpersonal notoriety, some self-styled intellectuals are able to disseminatetheir message of hatred of the Jews, presenting their work as legitimateinquiry and exposition.

They have found fertile ground among student editors eager to demon-strate their commitment to free speech and the airing of controversial ideas.Such inexpensive methodology allows deniers to reach the minds ofimpressionable young students, often with little knowledge of the Holo-caust, who are in the process of forming their own perceptions of worldhistory.146

Holocaust deniers claim to be legitimate historical revisionists, seekingto uncover the truth behind what they term as the largest hoax of the twenti-eth century. They need not convince students that the Holocaust is a myth;they score propaganda points merely by convincing them that the Holocaustis debatable.

Holocaust revisionism first emerged as an organized movement in1979, when Willis Carto’s Liberty Lobby, the nation’s largest antisemiticorganization, established the California-based Institute for HistoricalReview. Together with its publishing arm, Noontide Press, the IHR has put

144. Perhaps the professors could be excused because of a paucity of researchopportunities: It was rarely reported that—despite alleged shortages in buildingmaterials and crippling poverty—new malls and upscale restaurants in Gaza weredoing a booming business in the summer of 2010. See Tom Gross, “A Nice NewShopping Mall Opened Today in Gaza: Will the Media Report on It?,” MideastDispatch Archives, http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/mideastdispatches/archives/001127.html.

145. See Kenneth Lasson, “Holocaust Denial and the First Amendment: TheQuest for Truth in a Free Society,” George Mason Law Review, 6, no.1 (1997).

146. Lasson, “Holocaust Denial.”


out a number of books on white racialism, including Francis Parker Yockeyand David Hoggan’s The Myth of the Six Million, two of the first books todeny the Holocaust.147 For the most part, the authors are would-be scholarswith limited credentials in history, writers without academic certification,and other antisemites engaged in Holocaust denial.148

The Institute for Historical Review has been able to make its biggestimpact on college campuses under its “media projects director,” BradleySmith, who leads what he bills as the Committee for Open Debate on theHolocaust. In 1991, Smith bought a full-page advertisement in The DailyNorthwestern, the student publication of Northwestern University. The adhad the appearance of a newspaper article, appearing under the headline,“The Holocaust Story: How Much Is False? The Case for Open Debate.” Init, Smith argued that the “Holocaust lobby” prevents scholars from thor-oughly examining the “orthodox Holocaust story.” He alleged a lack ofproof that Jews were gassed at Auschwitz, and that the photographs of thepiles of corpses at Bergen-Belsen were a result of disease and starvationand not the result of the Nazi plan to murder Jews. Smith’s arguments weremade in the academic voice—he used no blatantly antisemitic terms, butemployed a seemingly thoughtful, rational discourse intended to provokeserious academic consideration.149

Smith’s “article” in The Daily Northwestern sparked a flurry of op-edpieces, letters to the editor, and on-campus lectures and forums—which inturn created even wider media coverage in the Chicago area. Emboldened,Smith subsequently submitted his ad/essays to other university newspapersaround the country, beginning with the University of Michigan. Within ayear, his handiwork had appeared in more than a third of the 60 studentnewspapers to which it had been submitted.150

During the 1993-94 school year, Smith launched another campaign,this one challenging the authenticity of the newly opened U.S. HolocaustMemorial Museum. He also attacked the scholarship of Professor DeborahLipstadt in her book Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truthand Memory. Smith charged that Lipstadt and those like her strive to sup-press revisionist research, and called for an end to their “fascistbehavior.”151

147. Willis A. Carto, “Fabricating History,” Anti-Defamation League, 2009,http://www.adl.org/Holocaust/carto.asp.

148. See Marcus, “The Resurgence” and “Anti-Zionism as Racism” (note 26).149. Marcus, “The Resurgence” and “Anti-Zionism as Racism.” See also Ken-

neth Lasson, “Defending Truth: Legal and Psychological Aspects of HolocaustDenial,” Current Psychology (November 2007).

150. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate (note 24).151. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate.


By the end of that academic year, Smith’s ad had been published in 32more campus newspapers—among them was The Justice, the student publi-cation of predominantly Jewish Brandeis University. The ad, which cost$130, created a propaganda bonanza: it was featured in major media outlets,including The New York Times, the Washington Post, and Time.152

Toward the end of the 1995 spring semester, Smith launched yetanother campaign, using the same advertisement he’d sent out the yearbefore. The submission was timed to appear on or around HolocaustRemembrance Day (“Yom Hashoah”). Although only 17 school newspa-pers printed the advertisement, given the timing an effective response wasalmost impossible to achieve.153

Bradley Smith and the IHR have been equally active over the last dec-ade. In September 2009, the Harvard Crimson published an IHR essay thatraised questions about General Dwight Eisenhower’s account of World WarII and the existence of Nazi gas chambers.154

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent declarations that“Israel must be wiped off the map” and that the Holocaust was a “fabricatedlegend” are but more candid statements of what academics the world overhave been saying for years.155

Former DePaul University professor Norman Finkelstein, for example,has argued that Israel “inappropriately invokes the Holocaust as a moraldefense for mistreating Palestinians.”156 Thus, another Big Lie is promul-

152. Brandeis never cashed the check for the ad, donating it instead to the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum—which itself declined to cash it. Ross and the ADL,Schooled in Hate.

153. Ross and the ADL, Schooled in Hate.154. The ad was quickly criticized, and the student editor issued an apology.

Evan Buxbaum, “Harvard Crimson Says Holocaust Denial Ad Published by Acci-dent,” CNN.com (September 10, 2009), http://edition.cnn.com/2009/US/09/09/massachusetts.harvard.Holocaust/index.html.

155. See, e.g., “Ahmadinejad Says Holocaust a Lie, Israel Has No Future,”Reuters, September 18, 2009, http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USTRE58H17S20090918. Ahmadinejad’s statements have been widely quoted. See, e.g.,Tamer El-Ghobashy and Bill Hutchinson, “Grinning Madman AhmadinejadSquirms at Columbia,” New York Daily News, September 25, 2007, http://nydailynews.com/news/2007/09/25/2007-9-25_grinning_madman_ahmadinejad_squirms_at_c.html.

156. See Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on theExploitation of Jewish Suffering (New York: Verso, 2000). In June 2010, Finkel-stein was deported from Israel and banned from returning for ten years, after accus-ing Israel of using the genocidal Nazi campaign against Jews to justify its actionsagainst the Palestinians. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel said the deporta-tion of Finkelstein was an assault on free speech. “The decision to prevent someone


gated and allowed to fester without being challenged. Academics could, butlargely don’t, refer their students to the evidence: that Israel existed as athriving country three thousand years before the Holocaust. Its kings andprophets walked the streets of Jerusalem (which, as noted earlier, is men-tioned in the Hebrew scriptures 600 times). Throughout the 2,000-year exileof the Jewish people, there was a continuous Jewish presence in the HolyLand. The modern rebirth of Israel began in the 1800s, with reclamation ofthe largely vacant land by pioneering Zionists, blossoming into a Jewishmajority long before the coming of the Nazis.157

LOUD AMERICAN VOICES

Antisemitic or anti-Zionist academics are not always naysayers likeFinkelstein, who remain relatively obscure except for their notoriety as indi-viduals who would deny or diminish the Holocaust.

Famed MIT professor Noam Chomsky has strongly criticized theUnited States’ support of the Israeli government and Israel’s treatment ofthe Palestinians—arguing that “ ‘supporters of Israel’ are in reality support-ers of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction,” and that“Israel’s very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to thatconsequence.” Chomsky disagreed with the founding of Israel as a Jewishstate (“I don’t think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper con-cept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state.”).158

In May 2006, Chomsky began an eight-day visit to Lebanon, where hemet with leaders of the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Chomsky receiveda hero’s welcome. During his trip, he endorsed and repeated much ofHezbollah’s rhetoric on Lebanese television, including on its own Al Manar

from voicing their opinions by arresting and deporting them is typical of a totalitar-ian regime,” said the association’s lawyer, Oded Peler. “A democratic state, wherefreedom of expression is the highest principle, does not shut out criticism or ideasjust because they are uncomfortable for its authorities to hear. It confronts thoseideas in public debate.” Toni O’Loughlin, “US Academic Deported and Banned forCriticizing Israel,” The Guardian, June 6, 2010.

157. “2010 Top Ten,” Wiesenthal Center (note 115).158. Deborah Solomon, “Questions for Noam Chomsky: The Professorial Provo-

cateur,” The New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/way-we-live-now-11-02-03-questions-for-noam-chomsky-professorial-provocateur.html.


TV,159 and expressed support for the arming of Hezbollah (in direct contra-diction to UN Security Council Resolution 1559).160

Chomsky embraced Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, whorefers to Jews as the “grandsons of apes and pigs,”161 and whose ideology isrooted in the group’s fundamentalist and antisemitic interpretation of Islam,which has been described as the “direct ideological heir of the Nazis.”162

Chomsky declared that “Hezbollah’s insistence on keeping its arms is justi-fied. . . . I think [Nasrallah] has a reasoned . . . and . . . persuasive argumentthat they [the arms] should be in the hands of Hezbollah as a deterrent topotential aggression.”163

Chomsky’s statements and actions typify what has been called “theunholy alliance between Islamic extremists and secular radicals in theWest.”164 Indeed, he describes the United States as “one of the leading ter-rorist states,” and claims that the attacks of September 11, 2001, pale incomparison to the terror that he suggests America perpetrated during the1973 Allende coup in Chile.165

These statements are nothing new for Chomsky, who has spentdecades promoting virulent anti-American and anti-Israeli propaganda.Although they are sometimes dismissed by his supporters as simple “eccen-tricity,” in fact they represent something far more damaging.166 Chomskyhas used his influence as a prominent linguist to support militant organiza-

159. See Tzvi Fleisher, “The Far Left and Radical Islamic International Alli-ance,” The Australian, June 8, 2006, 11.

160. The resolution declares the Security Council’s support of free, fair Lebanesepresidential elections and calls for the withdrawal of foreign troops from Lebanon.

161. Zachary Hughes, “Noam Chomsky’s Support for Hezbollah,” CAMERA,July 20, 2006, http://www.CAMERA.org/index.asp?x_content=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1551.

162. See Jeffrey Goldberg, “In the Party of God: Are Terrorists in Lebanon Pre-paring for a Larger War?,” The New Yorker, October 14, 2002, 180.

163. “Chomsky, Militants Meet,” The Jewish Daily Forward, May 19, 2006, 7.Shortly after Chomsky left Lebanon, Hezbollah used its arms to launch an unpro-voked attack on Israel. The attack seriously destabilized the already tense relation-ship among Israel, Lebanon, and Syria. See “Noam Chomsky’s Support forHezbollah,” CAMERA, June 20, 2006, http://www.CAMERA.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1151.

164. David Horowitz and Jacob Laksin, “Noam Chomsky’s Love Affair withNazis,” FrontPageMagazine.com, May 15, 2006, http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=4437.

165. Alan Taylor, “Noam Chomsky . . . Still Furious at 76,” The Sunday Herald,March 20, 2005, 4.

166. Zachary Hughes, “Noam Chomsky’s Support for Hezbollah,” CAMERA,July 7, 2006.


tions and murderous dictatorships, including not only Hezbollah andHamas, but also the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and Slobodan Milosevic inSerbia.167 His advocacy for these groups serves to minimize the atrocitiesthey have committed. While whitewashing them, he implicates those heperpetually paints as the guilty parties—the United States and Israel.168

Although one might conclude that Chomsky’s selective use of historyand frequent use of the Big Lie to advance the agenda of terrorist groupslike Hezbollah and Hamas is intellectually shameful and incendiary,169 it isof course necessary to recognize that he is entitled to his say. (As he himselfhas pointed out, “If we don’t believe in freedom of expression for peoplewe despise, we don’t believe in it at all.”)170

It is equally necessary, however, to challenge him forcefully on thefacts.

The Israel Lobby is a book that has been especially damaging to bothIsrael and the concept of honest scholarship. It was written by ProfessorsStephen Walt and John Mearsheimer (the former from Harvard, the latter

167. Hughes, “Support for Hezbollah.”168. On May 16, 2010, Israeli authorities detained Chomsky and refused to allow

his entry into the West Bank, where he was scheduled to lecture at the Institute forPalestinian Studies in Ramallah. Amira Hass, “After Denied Entry to West Bank,Chomsky Likens Israel to ‘Stalinist Regime,’ ” Haaretz, May 17, 2010. Reportingon the story, The New York Times’ Jerusalem correspondent noted that Chomsky“has objected to Israel’s foundation as a Jewish state, but he has supported a two-state solution and has not condemned Israel’s existence.” Ethan Bronner, “IsraelRoiled After Chomsky Barred from West Bank,” The New York Times, May 17,2010. See also Robert Mackey, “An Al Jazeera Interview with Noam Chomsky,”The New York Times, May 16, 2010; Ed Pilkington, “Noam Chomsky Barred byIsraelis from Lecturing in Palestinian West Bank,” Manchester Guardian, May 16,2010, guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/16/israel-noam-chomsky-palestinian-west-bank.

169. See Mark Lewis, Nonfiction Chronicle, The New York Times, November 20,2005, 24 (commenting on critique of Chomsky by Alan Dershowitz).

170. Noam Chomsky. BrainyQuote.com, Xplore Inc, 2010, http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/n/noamchomsk108350.html, accessed June 29, 2010.Alan Dershowitz, among other true civil libertarians, has long defended the freespeech rights of those whose views he despises—such as Professor James D. Wat-son, whose theories of racial inferiority resulted in the cancellation of his speech atRockefeller University; the right of Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois; and the rightof Tom Paulin, who advocated the murder of Israelis, to state his views. He alsoopposed Harvard’s attempt to prevent students from flying the Palestinian flag tocommemorate the death of mass murderer Yasser Arafat. See “A Conversationwith Alan Dershowitz,” http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-130083.html.


from the University of Chicago)—two respected scholars. In today’s world,unfortunately, that characterization does not do them justice.

The book presents a wholly conspiratorial view of history in which theso-called “Israel lobby” has a “stranglehold” on American foreign policy,the American media, think tanks, and academia. Three of its major weak-nesses were identified and analyzed by Harvard Law Professor Alan Der-showitz: quotations are wrenched out of context, important facts aremisstated or omitted, and embarrassingly poor logic is displayed. In sum,Professor Dershowitz asks why these professors would have chosen to pub-lish a paper that does not meet their usual scholarly standards, especiallygiven the risk—which should have been obvious to the authors—that theirimprimatur as prominent academics would be trumpeted on extremist Websites.171

Among the assertions made by The Israel Lobby is that the UnitedStates has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely alliedwith Israel. “There is no question, for example, that many Al Qaeda leaders,including Bin Laden, are motivated by Israel’s presence in Jerusalem andthe plight of the Palestinians.”172

In fact, the historical evidence strongly suggests that Bin Laden wasprimarily motivated by the presence of American troops in Saudi Arabia,which had asked the United States to defend the Arabian peninsula againstIraqi aggression prior to the first Gulf War. Thus, it was America’s ties toand defense of an Arab state (from which 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackersoriginated)—and not the Jewish state—that most clearly precipitated Sep-tember 11. Prior to that event, Israel was barely on Bin Laden’s radar. Nordoes Israel’s supposed domination of American public life explain terroristmassacres in Bali, Madrid, London, and elsewhere. Europe, after all, ispraised for being more immune to the lobby’s manipulation tactics.173

Mearsheimer and Walt claim that “contrary to popular belief, the Zion-ists had larger, better-equipped, and better-led forces during the 1947-49War of Independence.”174 Here, the authors purport to persuade their read-

171. Alan Dershowitz, “Debunking the Newest—and Oldest—Jewish Conspir-acy: A Reply to the Mearsheimer-Walt ‘Working Paper,’ ” Harvard Law School,April 2006, 5. See also Nicholas Rostow, “Wall of Reason: Alan Dershowitz v. theInternational Court of Justice,” 71 Alb. L. Rev., 71 (2008):953, 953ff.; Alex Safian,“Study Decrying Israel Lobby Marred by Numerous Errors,” CAMERA, March 20,2006, http://www.CAMERA.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=35&x_article=1099; Eli Lake, “David Duke Claims to Be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean,” NewYork Sun, March 20, 2006, 1.

172. Safian, “Study Decrying ‘Israel Lobby.’ ”173. Safian, “Study Decrying ‘Israel Lobby.’ ”174. Safian, “Study Decrying ‘Israel Lobby.’ ”


ers that, despite the Arab world’s several attempts to eliminate the Jewishstate and exterminate its inhabitants, Israel has never been in serious dan-ger. To the contrary, however, the invading Arab armies—trained profes-sional military forces—possessed armor and a steep manpower advantage,whereas Israel “had few heavy weapons and no artillery, armored vehicles,or planes.”175 Accounts of the number of soldiers and armament in the 1948war vary considerably. One estimate shows the Arab armies with ten timesmore aircraft than the Israelis, and one could easily observe the greatdisparity.176

Anti-Zionists often claim that Jews have no historical right to the landof Israel. To do so, one must deny Jewish history, which is precisely whatUniversity of Michigan professor Juan Cole does—most recently in an arti-cle published by Salon online magazine in which Cole asserted that Jerusa-lem was neither built by “the likely then non-existent ‘Jewish people’ ” in1000 BCE nor even inhabited at that point in history. Instead, “Jerusalemappears to have been abandoned between 1000 BCE and 900 BCE, thetraditional dates for the united kingdom under David and Solomon.”177

Yet, as anyone who has actually been in Jerusalem can attest, it is allbut impossible to be physically present in the oldest areas of the city andnot encounter relics dating from between 1000 and 900 BCE. In revisinghistory, Cole’s motivation is like that of the openly genocidal antisemiticMuslim world, as well as that of many liberals who claim to oppose bigotry.As one astute observer pointed out, “For these people, pretending awaytheir prejudice is the key to their continued claim to enlightenment.”178

Why do so many left-leaning Jewish academics support regimes andideologies that seek to annihilate Israel? During the summer of 2006 and inthe following years, while Hezbollah was raining rockets on northern Israeland Hamas was doing the same in the south, leftist professors rushed tocondemn the Jewish State for going into Lebanon and Gaza to try to stemthe fire. A thousand of them signed a petition denouncing Israel for its “bru-tal bombing and invasion of Gaza” and its “acts of Israeli state terrorism” inLebanon. There was no denunciation of Hamas or Hezbollah—only a callfor the immediate release of jailed terrorists (whom the petition described as“Palestinian and Lebanese political prisoners”) and a condemnation of“Israel’s destructive and expansionist policies,” which, the petition said,

175. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, 30 (note 134).176. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel.177. Juan Cole, “Ten Reasons Why East Jerusalem Does Not Belong to Israel,”

Salon, http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/feature/2010/03/23/jerusalem_israel.178. Caroline Glick, “See No Evil,” Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2010.


were “primarily to blame for the seemingly perpetual ‘Middle Eastcrisis.’ ”179

Three of the most prominent signatories of the petition were Chomsky,Finkelstein, and Stanford’s Joel Beinin (all of them Jewish).180

Such attitudes, of course, are not limited to the Ivory Tower. Formerpresident Jimmy Carter is not an academic, but his bestselling book, Pales-tine: Peace Not Apartheid, is likewise replete with twisted history. Mirror-ing the views of many anti-Israel professors, a considerable number of thefacts upon which his book’s premise rests are demonstrably false.181

While honest academicians should have been quick to criticize theinaccuracies of Carter’s book, this time it was the media that were in theforefront of taking the former president to task. The Providence Journalcalled the book “a scathingly anti-Israel polemic,” which “absurdly[charges] that Israel engages in ‘worse instances of apartness, or apartheid,than we witnessed even in South Africa.’ ” It questions how a former presi-dent can stoop to such journalistic lows, without any sense of balance.“Carter blames minuscule Israel, bordered by enemies who desire its anni-hilation, for the failure of peace with the Palestinians, while skimming overthe latter’s terrorist attacks and their refusal to recognize even Israel’s rightto exist.”182

The Atlanta Journal Constitution listed a number of former Carter loy-alists who, because of the book, felt the need publicly to distance them-selves from their erstwhile mentor. When such people feel “so betrayed by

179. Jamie Glazov, “Leftist Jews Who Worship at Altar of Anti-Semitism,”WorldNetDaily, March 4, 2009, http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/6996.

180. In 2004, Beinin wrote an article entitled “The New McCarthyism: PolicingThought about the Middle East,” in which he denounced the Ford Foundation’sdecision to withdraw funding from any university grantee that finances the promo-tion of “violence, terrorism, or bigotry or the destruction of any state.” What wor-ried Beinin was that such restrictions could potentially hurt a “Palestinian studentgroup [that] called for the replacement of the state of Israel with a secular, demo-cratic state,” meaning one seeking the extermination of Israel. Steven Plaut, “JoelBeinin Whines about Israeli Airport’s ‘Harassment,’ ” FrontPage, December 1,2009, http://frontpagemag.com/2009/12/01/joel-beinin-whines-about-israeli-air-ports-harassment-by-steven-plaut/.

181. See http://zionism-israel.com/israel_news/2007/02/everything-you-wanted-to-know-about.html. Mearsheimer and Walt seem to adopt Carter’s views; seeRichard Baehr and Ed Lasky, “Stephen Walt’s War with Israel,” AmericanThinker, http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/03/stephen_walts_war_with_israel.html.

182. “Carter Versus Israel,” Editorial, Providence Journal, January 2, 2007,http://www.projo.com/opinion/editorials/content/ED_jimmy2_01-02-07_0H3K9AB.204ccd9.html.


the assertions in his latest book that they divorce themselves from his leg-acy work, the rest of us should surely take notice.”183

Former American diplomat Dennis Ross pointed out essential flaws inCarter’s book in a New York Times article: “Mr. Carter’s presentation badlymisrepresents the Middle East proposals advanced by President Bill Clintonin 2000, and in so doing undermines, in a small but important way, effortsto bring peace to the region. The reader is left to conclude that the Clintonproposals must have been so ambiguous and unfair that Yasser Arafat, thePalestinian leader, was justified in rejecting them. But that is simplyuntrue.”184

The Times’ own Middle East correspondent, Ethan Bronner, wasequally critical, calling Carter’s work

a strange little book about the Arab-Israeli conflict from a major publicfigure. It is premised on the notion that Americans too often get only oneside of the story, one uncritically sympathetic to Israel, so someone withauthority and knowledge needs to offer a fuller picture. Fine idea. Theproblem is that in this book Jimmy Carter does not do so. Instead, hesimply offers a narrative that is largely unsympathetic to Israel. Israelibad faith fills the pages. Hollow statements by Israel’s enemies arepresented without comment. Broader regional developments go largelyunexamined. In other words, whether or not Carter is right that mostAmericans have a distorted view of the conflict, his contribution is tooffer a distortion of his own.185

A reviewer for the Washington Post said that Carter “blames Israelalmost entirely for perpetuating the hundred-year war between Arab andJew,” and “manufactures sins to hang around the necks of Jews when nosins have actually been committed.”186

THE YALE INITIATIVE

Ironically, perhaps the most pernicious effects of academic antisemit-ism can be illustrated by looking at what happened to the short-lived YaleInitiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism (YIISA).

183. “Carter Aside, Israel Deserves Total Support,” Editorial, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 14, 2007, C6.

184. Dennis Ross, “Don’t Play with Maps,” The New York Times, January 9,2007.

185. Ethan Bronner, “Jews, Arabs and Jimmy Carter,” The New York Times, Jan-uary 7, 2007.

186. See Jeffrey Goldberg, “What Would Jimmy Do?,” Washington Post,December 10, 2006.


In 2005, Professor Charles Small founded the Institute for the Study ofGlobal Anti-Semitism and Policy as an independent research organizationto study global antisemitism and other forms of racism. In 2006, the centerbecame part of Yale University’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies,as YIISA. At the time, it was the fourth university center for antisemitism tobe established, following similar centers at Berlin’s Technical University,the Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University.

In August 2010, YIISA sponsored an international conference entitled“Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity,”187 which featured scholarsfrom a wide variety of backgrounds;188 some of these scholars highlightedinstances of antisemitism in the Arab-Muslim world.

Almost immediately, the U.S. representative of the Palestine Libera-tion Organization accused Yale of hosting a conference catering to right-wing extremists.189 Various other Arab individuals and groups followedsuit, expressing dismay at what they perceived as Yale’s endorsement of“bigotry and bias.”190

Whether Yale capitulated to the charges of bias, and if so for whatreasons, is open to question—but its actions are not. In early June 2011, theuniversity announced that it would be closing YIISA because it “had notmet its academic expectations.” That decision sparked widespread criticismfrom the American Jewish community.191 David Harris, executive director

187. The conference was cosponsored by the Isaac and Jessie Kaplan Centre forJewish Studies and Research (University of Cape Town); The Vidal Sassoon Inter-national Center for the Study of Antisemitism (Hebrew University, Jerusalem); theStephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism(Tel Aviv University), the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism(Indiana University), the Rabin Chair Forum (George Washington University), andthe Pears Institute for the Study of Antisemitism (Birbeck College, University ofLondon).

188. Among the keynote and plenary speakers were Irwin Cotler (McGill Uni-versity, Canada), Jeffrey Herf (University of Maryland), Richard Landes (BostonUniversity), Deborah Lipstadt (Emory University), Meir Litvak (Tel Aviv Univer-sity), Menahem Milson (Hebrew University), Dina Porat (Tel Aviv University),Milton Shain (University of Cape Town), Bassam Tibi (University of Goettingen,Germany), and Ruth Wisse (Harvard University).

189. Nora Caplan-Bricker, “Palestinian Representative Calls Yale Conference‘Anti-Arab,’ ” Yale Daily News, September 2, 2010.

190. See, e,g., Yaman Salahi, “Anti-Semitism but Not Anti-Hatred,” Yale DailyNews, September 1, 2010, and Adam Horowitz, “Yale Anti-Semitism ConferenceContinues to Make Waves,” Mondoweiss, September 8, 2010, http://mondoweiss.net/2010/09/yale-anti-semitism-conference-continues-to-make-waves.html.

191. Jordana Horn, “Jews Decry Yale Closing Anti-Semitism Study Center,”Jerusalem Post, July 9, 2011.


of the American Jewish Committee, said the initiative’s termination would“create a very regrettable void.” Abraham Foxman, the national director ofthe Anti-Defamation League, stated, “Especially at a time when anti-Semi-tism continues to be virulent and anti-Israel parties treat any effort toaddress issues relating to anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism as illegitimate,Yale’s decision is particularly unfortunate and dismaying.”192

Others charged that Yale’s decision to close YIISA was primarilypolitical in nature, due to its focus on Muslim antisemitism, because it“refused to ignore the most virulent, genocidal and common form of Jew-hatred today: Muslim anti-Semitism.”193 Walter Reich, a member of theboard of advisors of YIISA and a former director of the U.S. HolocaustMemorial Museum, wrote that the closure had come from a “firestorm” thathad ensued after the conference YIISA hosted in August 2010, entitled“Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity.”194

Within a month after Yale said YIISA would be closed, the universityannounced the creation of a new center for the study of antisemitism, to becalled “Yale Program for the Study of Anti-Semitism” (YPSA).195 The newprogram is supposed to focus primarily on the study of historical antisemit-ism, as opposed to what goes on in the twenty-first century. But doing that

192. Ron Kampeas, “Shuttering of Yale Program on Anti-Semitism RaisesHackles,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June 10, 2011. See also Tovia Smith, “YaleShuts Down Anti-Semitism Program,” National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/2011/06/17/137241373/yale-shuts-down-anti-semitism-program.

193. See, e.g., Abby Wisse Schachter, “Yale’s Latest Gift to Anti-Semitism,”New York Post, June 6, 2011; and Caroline Glick, “Yale, Jews and Double Stan-dards,” Jerusalem Post, June 9, 2011.

194. Walter Reich, “Saving the Yale Anti-Semitism Institute,” Washington Post,June 13, 2011. Conversely, Antony Lerman, a British scholar, argued that YIISAhad become politicized and that its demise should be welcomed by those who “gen-uinely support the principle of the objective, dispassionate study of contemporaryantisemitism.” Daniel Treiman, “Lipstadt on Yale Anti-Semitism Initiative: Advo-cacy Sometimes Trumped Scholarship, JTA. June 16, 2011. Robert Wistrich, thedirector of the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism atHebrew University, agreed with the decision to close the the center, saying thatthere was “no way that Yale could have come to a different decision” given theprogram’s perceived lack of academic rigor. Raphael Ahren, “Jerusalem Anti-Sem-itism Scholar Backs Yale’s Move to Ax Program,” Ha’aretz, July 15, 2011.

195. “Yale to Launch New Anti-Semitism Program,” The Jewish Daily Forward,June 20, 2011. See also Jessica Shepherd, “Yale University Caught in NewAntisemitism Controversy,” The Guardian, June 22, 2011.


serves to gloss over issues that scholars must address today, especially inview of the real threat of contemporary radical Islamist antisemitism.196

PRACTICAL AND LEGISLATIVE REMEDIES

University leadership should set a moral example by denouncing anti-Semitic and other hate speech . . .—U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Regarding Campus Anti-Semitism

Although freedom of speech is guaranteed by the First Amendment,and should protect both the individual as well as the idea of academic free-dom on university campuses, constitutional remedies are nevertheless avail-able to address the problems of antisemitism. Principal among them is theright (if not the obligation) to recognize antisemitism when it occurs, topresent the facts clearly and accurately, and to condemn it vociferously.

Failure to speak out, on the other hand, sends a message that suchhatred is tolerable and acceptable. Indeed, the American Association ofUniversity Professors (AAUP) specifically endorses the condemnation ofhateful and bigoted speech and conduct by college and university facultyand administrators.197

Moreover, although words themselves can have injurious effects, anti-Israel and antisemitic activists consistently go beyond mere rhetoric and useviolence to coerce adherence to their point of view. The First Amendmentdoes not protect either words or actions that are directed toward incitementof immediate lawlessness—and certainly neither words nor actions that areintended to place Jews and other pro-Israel students in fear of immediatebodily harm.198

It has long been established, of course, that there can be Constitutionallimits on speech: defamation, fighting words, conspiracies, misleadingadvertisements, threats, or exhortations that create a risk of imminent vio-

196. Jordana Horn, “Yale University Launches New Program on Anti-Semi-tism,” Jerusalem Post, June 22, 2011 (quoting Charles Small, the former executivedirector of YIISA). See also Michael Rubin, “A Challenge to Yale University onAnti-Semitism,” Commentary, July 1, 2011; Ron Rosenbaum, “Yale’s Newest Jew-ish Quota,” Slate, July 1, 2011; and Adam Brodsky, “Yale’s Anti-Semitism White-wash,” New York Post, July 6, 2011.

197. The AAUP is an organization, founded in 1915, comprising faculty librari-ans and academic professionals at two- and four- year accredited public and privatecolleges and universities. Its mission is “developing the standards and proceduresthat maintain quality in education and academic freedom in this country’s collegesand universities.”

198. See Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969); Chaplinsky v. New Hamp-shire 315 U.S. 568 (1942).


lence. Comparing the harms to the speaker and the victim of hate speechsuggests that limiting the latter may be cost effective.199

In recent years, there has been increasing debate over the question ofwhether it is permissible for the government to curb “hate speech,” under-stood to mean that which demeans or expresses hostility or contempttoward target groups based on their race, religion, ethnic background, sex-ual orientation, or other identifying characteristics. The Supreme Court hasnever specifically adjudicated the constitutionality of a campus hate speechcode, but several lower courts have struck down such codes as unconstitu-tional restrictions on freedom of speech.200

Every Western democracy except the United States regulates hatespeech. Many particularly prohibit and punish Holocaust denial.201 A popu-lar academic exercise often admiringly analyzes other countries’ legislationlimiting hate speech.202 But comparing the American approach to others isinherently problematic. Our system has served us well.

Universities must also ensure that they have continual systems andprograms in place to monitor the climate on their campuses. In the course ofpromoting the values of respect, tolerance, diversity, and inclusiveness, theymust also allow and encourage vigorous debate and academic freedom.

One way to handle hecklers seeking to disrupt speakers at universityforums is as follows:

When controversial speakers appear on campus, in advance of theevent, clearly announce to and notify students that they will have an oppor-tunity to question or challenge or make comments—but that interruptionswill not be tolerated. Moreover, students who engage in disruptive speechor behavior will be firmly sanctioned, either with suspensions or expul-sions. If such a policy were strictly enforced, it would go far to deter bothbully pulpits and hostile audiences.

Other remedies that have been proposed range from simply lodging acomplaint with the authorities to imposing boycotts of alumni funding pro-

199. See Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, “Four Observations about HateSpeech,” Wake Forest L. Rev., 44 (2009):353.

200. Thomas A. Schweitzer, “Hate Speech on Campus and the First Amendment:Can They Be Reconciled?,” Conn. L. Rev., 27 (1995):493.

201. See Kenneth Lasson, “Holocaust Denial and the First Amendment: TheQuest for Truth in a Free Society,” Geo. Mason L. Rev., 6 (1997):35.

202. To a number of scholars, German hate-speech regulation is particularlyattractive. Given the fundamental differences between the two approaches to freespeech, however, and consequently to hate-speech regulation, we should not be soquick to adopt the German approach. Claudia E. Haupt, “Regulating HateSpeech—Damned If You Do and Damned If You Don’t: Lessons Learned fromComparing the German and U.S. Approaches,” 23 B.U. Int’l L.J., 23 (2005):299.


grams. The problem with the former is that it is difficult to draw a linebetween censuring intimidation and restricting free speech or academicfreedom. Moreover, one does not wish to feed a “culture of complaint.”203

Boycotts, on the other hand, cut both ways, and can cause more harm thangood.204

Direct confrontation thus remains the best remedy.Academics should denounce antisemitism with the same rational

resolve as people like Pilar Rahola, a Spanish politician, journalist, activist,and member of the far left:

I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am left and by profession a journalist.Why am I not anti-Israeli like my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew Ihave the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and cur-rently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fightagainst anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews. As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyondprejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As aperson from the left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty,culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that theTablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles thatIslamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as anon-Jew, journalist and lefty, I have a triple moral duty with Israel,because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will bedestroyed too.205

To be sure, there are a few hopeful signs on the horizon.One is Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Governed and directed

by academics, SPME envisions “a world in which Israel exists as a sover-eign Jewish state within secure borders and her neighbors achieve theirlegitimate peaceful aspirations.” However, as its mission statementobserves:

[A]cademic discourse is increasingly influenced by ideological distor-tions, politically biased scholarship, and agenda-driven speakers whodemonize Israel and Zionism as bearing full responsibility for the Mid-dle-East conflict. Such indoctrination violates academic traditions ofscholarly integrity and degrades the academic enterprise. It poisonsdebate about the Middle East, inflames hatred of Israel, spreads anti-

203. For example, students at Columbia University filed a complaint against Pro-fessor Joseph Massad for intimidating students with anti-Zionist diatribes. SeeSagiv, “A Study in Hate,” 14 (note 5).

204. Sagiv, “A Study in Hate.”205. Pilar Rahola, “A Leftist Speaks Out,” Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, March

24, 2010, 50.


Semitism, incites anti-Israeli militancy, and serves to excuse or tolerateterrorist attacks and genocidal threats against Israel. Anti-Israel slandersexacerbate conflict and undermine prospects for peace.206

Some student groups, such as the Union of Jewish Students, have alsobecome increasingly active.207

On occasion, politicians have been unusually forthright in stating theiropposition to events like “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” on campus. In February2010, for example, Members of Provincial Parliament (MPPs) of varyingpolitical ideologies in Ontario collectively and unanimously condemnedIsraeli Apartheid Week, which one MP contended was “about as close tohate speech as one can get without getting arrested, and I’m not certain itdoesn’t actually cross over that line,”208 specifically noting that the nameitself is offensive to the millions of black South Africans who experiencedoppression under a racist white regime until the early 1990s. AddressingCanada’s worldwide notoriety as a pro-Israel country, Peter Shurman fur-ther argued, “[If] you’re going to label Israel as apartheid, then you are alsocalling Canada apartheid and you are attacking Canadian values.” The par-liamentarians encourage constructive, respectful debate about the MiddleEast, but the use of inflammatory words—like “apartheid”—do not provideany benefit to the discourse. The minister of training, colleges and universi-ties, John Milloy, believes that “campuses are places for debate and discus-sion—they often get into areas that can offend people . . . the goal has to be. . . to make sure that there’s not hatred on campus—nothing that wouldmake a student feel threatened.” Actions like that of the Ontario legislatureillustrate the potential for change, and marks a small, yet noteworthy, step

206. Mission Statement, Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, http://spme.net/.207. The UJS today enjoys relatively better funding and organization than it did

in the past, but if it and other student groups are to take an effective stand againstantisemitism on campus they will need considerably more support and resourcesfrom those with positions of power and influence. Jan Shure, “We Could HaveDealt with Campus Hate Long Ago,” The Jewish Chronicle Online, February 12,2009, http://www.thejc.com/comment/comment/we-could-have-dealt-campus-hate-long-ago.

208. Peter Shurman, remarks in support of condemnation of Israeli ApartheidWeek. Dan Verbin, “Ontario Legislature Denounces Israel Apartheid Week,”ShalomLife, February 26, 2010, http://www.shalomlife.com/eng/6838/Ontario_Legislature_Denounces_Israel_Apartheid_Week/. See also Robert Benzie, “MPPsDecry Linking Israel to ‘Apartheid,’ ” Thestar.com, February 26, 2010, http://www.thestar.com/news/Ontario/article/77161—mpps-decry-linking-israel-to-apartheid; Goldstone, “Israel and the Apartheid Slander” (note 115).


toward widespread condemnation of hateful, antisemitic speech in the aca-demic voice.209

There are some legislative remedies available as well. Title VI, 42U.S.C. §2000d et seq., of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, requiresrecipients of federal funding to ensure that their programs are free fromharassment, intimidation, and discrimination on the basis of race, color, andnational origin. In order to receive federal funding from the U.S. Depart-ment of Education, colleges and universities must comply with Title VI; theOffice for Civil Rights (OCR) in the Department of Education is chargedwith the responsibility of ensuring that colleges and universities are in com-pliance. Historically, the OCR’s interpretation of Title VI did not protectagainst antisemitism, on the grounds that the law did not cover religiousdiscrimination. This policy was changed in 2004, when the OCR confirmedthat Jewish students are protected under Title VI. This decision was madebased on the idea that being “Jewish” is not simply a religious characteris-tic; it is also a racial and ethnic characteristic, describing a people whoshare not only a religion, but also a common ancestry, history, heritage, andculture. The decision to incorporate Jews under Title VI is in line with theU.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb,where the civil-rights protections under the Civil Rights Act of 1866 wereextended.210

But legislative remedies have to be initiated by individuals and groups,and actively pursued.

In October 2004, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) filed acomplaint with the OCR under Title VI on behalf of Jewish students at theUniversity of California Irvine (UCI), arguing that the university had longbeen aware of a hostile and intimidating environment for Jewish students,but that it did not take adequate steps to protect the students. Despite anabundance of data provided by the ZOA, the OCR found “insufficient evi-dence to support the complainant’s allegation that the University failed torespond promptly and effectively to complaints by Jewish students that theywere harassed and subjected to a hostile environment.”211

209. See references in note 208.210. 481 U.S. 615 (1987).211. The ZOA has indicated that it will continue to fight for the students at UCI

and across American campuses through an appeal of the OCR decision. Title VI isusually used to fight discriminatory practices during admission, and not for a stu-dent’s protection against racial discrimination or bias. Its use in this manner coulddepend largely on ZOA’s appeal of the UCI decision. Morton Klein, “ZOA Con-demns Office for Civil Rights’ Decision Not to Protect Jewish Students fromAntisemitic Harassment,” Zionist Organization of America, December 19, 2007,http://www.zoa.org/sitedocuments/pressrelease_view.asp?pressreleaseID=264.


In March 2010, a number of Jewish-American associations joined in aletter to Arne Duncan, secretary of the U.S. Department of Education,addressing the very issue of Title VI and its application to Jewish students.In their letter, the associations explained how the OCR has retreated fromits 2004 position, and urged Secretary Duncan to ensure that the OCR onceagain interprets Title VI to protect Jewish students from antisemitic harass-ment. They point out that the Hon. Russlyn Ali, assistant secretary of edu-cation for civil rights, wrote, in a July 2009 letter to California congressmanBen Sherman, that Title VI does not cover antisemitic harassment, intimida-tion, and discrimination. This statement from Assistant Secretary Ali indi-cates that the OCR has effectively concluded that it will discontinue itsenforcement of Title VI in cases where a Jewish student asserts racial orethnic discrimination based on his or her status as a Jewish individual. Thissends an official government message to campus perpetrators, the associa-tions contended, that they can continue their antisemitic behavior becausecolleges and universities no longer have a legal obligation to report hatefulconduct, and campus administrations are therefore free to simply notrespond to antisemitism on their campuses, even when their Jewish studentsfeel threatened and intimidated.212

In contrast, see what happens when students and faculty do fight back,as is beginning to occur in California. The Felber and Rossman-Benjamincases represent an important departure for a community that has often beendivided between accommodationist and defensive positions.213

Professor Rossman-Benjamin’s case is notable because it bringsaccountability to both the university and the federal government. She filedher case with the OCR, arguing that Santa Cruz violated Title VI of theCivil Rights Act of 1964—the same statute that bars racial segregation inthe public schools, but that is applied more broadly to racial and ethnicdiscrimination in federally-funded programs. It is important to understandthat this approach does not require (or even permit) universities to censor orregulate speech, which is protected under the First Amendment. There are,however, numerous actions the university could take, such as issuing formalstatements condemning the discriminatory conduct, developing educationalresources to demonstrate the irrationality of the biased statements, and pro-viding counseling for students who are adversely affected.214

212. Russlyn Ali, letter to education secretary re: Antisemitic Intimidation onCampus, Anti-Defamation League, http://www.adl.org/Civil_Rights/letter_associationjlj_2010.asp.

213. See Marcus references, note 26.214. See Marcus references, note 26. In 2011, the OCR informed Rossman-Ben-

jamin that it is formally opening an investigation of her claims.


In July 2010, the Congressional Taskforce Against Anti-Semitism senta letter to secretary of education Arne Duncan, expressing concern that vari-ous complaints about antisemitic incidents at UC Irvine had never beenproperly addressed by the OCR. The letter noted the rising number of suchincidents on college campuses, which it called “significant and dis-turbing”—especially in view of the fact that racism is generally decreasingin the United States. In addition, the letter suggested that even more suchincidents go unreported because of discriminatory harassment andintimidation.215

“College campuses in the United States are meant to be positive, safeand open forums for intellectual expression, conducive to learning,” wroteCongressman Ron Klein, a Florida Democrat and member of the task force.“We believe that enforcing Title VI to protect Jewish students who, in rarebut highly significant situations, face harassment, intimidation or discrimi-nation based on their ancestral or ethnic characteristics—including when itis manifested as anti-Israel or anti-Zionist sentiment that crosses the lineinto anti-Semitism—would help ensure that we’re preserving the integrityof our higher education system by affording the same protection to all eth-nic and racial groups on our college campuses.”216

Another letter about antisemitism on UC campuses, written by twelvepro-Israel groups, was sent to UC president Mark Yudof. The letter wassupported by some 700 UC students, who signed an online position assert-ing that the university’s response to recent antisemitic incidents on campushas caused many students to feel as if they are in an “environment of har-assment and intimidation.” Yudof, who is Jewish, responded, urging thatthe groups support UC’s newly formed Advisory Council on Campus Cli-mate, Culture, and Inclusion. The council had been created in response to

215. The complaint had argued that the OCR did not exercise jurisdiction follow-ing its 2007 investigation of the ZOA’s 2004 complaint with the OCR, alleging thatfailed to promptly and adequately respond to Jewish students’ complaints that theyexperienced severe and persistent antisemitic intimidation and harassment on cam-pus. It said that UCI should be subject to investigation/penalties under Title VI ofthe Civil Rights Act of 1964; that the incidents were based on the students’ ances-try or ethnic characteristics, rather than their religious identity, and thus fell withinthe scope of the OCR’s jurisdiction under Title VI; and that the OCR’s ruling was“inconsistent with its own policy statements for enforcing Title VI as expressed inrecent years.

216. The task force sought clarification of the OCR’s investigation and enforce-ment authority to remedy instances of harassment/discrimination/intimidationagainst Jewish students, requesting that it hear from the OCR before the start of thenew school year. The letter was signed by 36 members of Congress. See http://www.zoa.org/media/user/images/Congressional-Taskforce-Against%20Anti-Semitism-Letter-to-Secretary-Duncan.pdf.


numerous incidents of harassment on campus, including spray-paintingswastikas on the UC Davis campus.217

The council held its first meeting this summer. The students who wrotethe letter argued that UC’s response to the antisemitic acts has been tooweak. Yudof said he will “do everything in [his] power to protect Jewishand all other students from threats or actions of intolerance,” but he alsocriticized the letter as “a dishearteningly ill-informed rush to judgmentagainst our ongoing responses to troubling incidents that have taken placeon some of our campuses.” He added that “the Jewish groups may havebased their concerns on an unreliable sampling of student opinion andthat most Jewish UC students’ perspectives ‘are more mixed than yousuggest.’ ”218

Meanwhile, in response to the incident in which Israeli ambassadorMichael Oren was hounded off the rostrum at UC Irvine by anti-Israel dem-onstrators, administrators embarked on a four-month-long investigation,and announced in June its unprecedented recommendation to suspend theMuslim Student Union, a registered campus organization, for its involve-ment in disrupting the ambassador’s speech. Eleven students were arrested,and may face criminal charges as well as university disciplinary action. Thedecision came after several months of intense pressure by a number of off-campus Zionist organizations. In February, the ZOA called upon Jewishdonors to withhold donations from UC Irvine and urged Jewish students notto enroll there. The Muslim Student Union is appealing the decision.219

CONCLUSION

In sum, there are a variety of ways to confront and condemn antisemit-ism in the academic voice and remain in harmony with First Amendmentvalues.

One recommendation is to exercise a bit of self-restraint. Instead ofcrying “Nazi” every time the Israeli Defense Force does something withwhich an academic disagrees, or urging a boycott of Israeli academics, orsigning petitions encouraging soldiers to desert their units or calling on

217. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/07/uc-president-mark-yudof-c_n_637311.html.

218. “UC President in Unusual Public Dispute with Several American JewishGroups,” Los Angeles Times blog, July 6, 2010.

219. Omar Kurdi, “UC Irvine’s Message: Criticize Israel, Get Suspended,”LATimes.com, June 22, 2010, http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-0622-kurdi-uci-muslim-20100622,0,1942963.story.


European powers to immediately intervene to “save” the Palestinians froma “genocide,” hold your tongue.220

Another is to assist Israel’s defenders in driving a wedge between theJewish State’s soft- and hard-core critics—between, for example, human-rights groups like Oxfam, which take issue with Israeli policy, and radicalIslamists who deny the state’s very legitimacy.221

It is the obligation of all academics either to recognize or refute claimsthat have no basis in fact or logic—not to ignore them.

Not only can offensive speech and conduct be constitutionally con-fronted and condemned, but responsible administrators, faculty, and stu-dents have a moral imperative to do so.

Not only are the principles of academic freedom and the universalityof science at stake, but ultimately so are democratic values in a free society.

Not only should scholars shoulder their responsibility to be informedand aware, but they also should recognize their obligation to respond whenthey see logic and common sense gone awry and objective fact and docu-mented history either ignored or denied.

Academics everywhere should likewise not allow history and logic tobe rendered meaningless by twisted rhetoric—whether it emanates from thecandid rant of the president of Iran, or a former president of the UnitedStates who receives substantial sums of money from Arab governments, ora somewhat more subtle but equally antisemitic university professor speak-ing in an academic voice.

*Kenneth Lasson is a professor of law at the University of Baltimore. He isRegents Scholar, University System of Maryland, and director of the Haifa Sum-mer Law Institute. Professor Lasson is the author of Trembling in the Ivory Tower(Bancroft, 2003), and has written book chapters in Eunice Pollack’s (ed.)Antisemitism on the Campus (Academic Studies, 2011) and in Steven K. Baum,Florette Cohen, and Steven L. Jacobs’ (eds.) North American Antisemitism, Vol. 15(Brill, in preparation).

220. [W]hen children don’t behave correctly, it is the parents’ responsibility tocorrect this, not scream hysterically that the children are “little Nazis” and leave thehouse. . . . The Israeli academy is like a parent to the citizenry of the state, but thebehavior of some of its members has come to resemble that of spoiled children.Frantzman, “Terra Incognita” (note 73).

221. See Mizroch, “Study Surveys” (note 88 and accompanying text).

Antisemitism and the Campus Left

Richard Cravatts*

The campus war against Israel and Jews is indicative of the devolution ofhigher education, where scholarship has been degraded by bias on thepart of a Leftist professoriate. The professoriate’s political agenda enlistsIsrael as the new villain in the name of social justice. University leadershave been feckless in moderating this new antisemitism. Either they 1)are unaware of fields of study that have been hijacked by academicfrauds and morally incoherent scholars, or 2) sympathize and havebecome complicit in the production of pseudo-scholarship, academicagitprop, and disingenuous learning experiences. The result has produceda one-sided, biased approach to understanding the Israeli/Palestinianconflict.

Key Words: Antisemitism, Anti-Israelism, Anti-Zionism, Palestinian

The university’s war against Israel has been pervasive and intensify-ing, promulgated by the active participation both of leftist faculty and radi-cal Muslim student groups on campuses where the long-sufferingPalestinians have replaced South African blacks as the left’s favorite victimgroup—whose behavior, however violent and politically irrational, isexcused as justifiable in a 63-year-old campaign to demand that Israel grantthe Arabs self-determination and social justice.

The other, and related, trend of anti-Israelism on campuses—and,indeed, off campuses as well—is that derision of Zionism and the denuncia-tion of Israel has become a convenient way for antisemites to mask theirtrue prejudice against Jews by claiming that their problem is only with thepolicies of Israel, not with Jews themselves. While classic antisemitism isno longer considered acceptable in most Westernized societies, especiallyin the aftermath of the Holocaust, Jew-haters (and some liberal, Israel-hat-ing Jews themselves) have found a convenient and effective way to masktheir true feelings: they single out the world’s only Jewish state for condem-nation and hold it to a standard higher than they do for any other nation, notcoincidentally including those Arab states and the Palestinians themselves,against whom Israel is perpetually and unfairly compared in action, self-defense, and self-determination.

Thus, on campuses today Israel is regularly, though falsely, con-demned for being created “illegally”—through the “theft” of Palestinianlands and property—and therefore has no “right to exist.” The government

407


is accused of a “brutal,” illegal “occupation” of Palestinian lands, especiallyGaza and the West Bank, of being a “colonial settler state,” a Zionist“regime,” a land-hungry nation building an “apartheid wall” as a furtherland grab, a usurper of property that was lived on and owned by a Palestin-ian “people” “from time immemorial.” Zionism is regularly equated withNazism, and the perceived offenses of Israel’s government and military arelikened to Nazi crimes against humanity; the conceit is that Israel is creat-ing a “Holocaust on the Holy Land” through “ethnic cleansing,” ongoing“genocide” of Arabs, and the elimination of the rights of an innocent,“indigenous people” who merely seek self-determination and the peacefulcreation of a Palestinian homeland. The very existence of the country isdescribed as being the “greatest threat to world peace,” the core cause ofMuslim anger toward the West, the root of the Palestinians’ suffering; thenation has even been referred to publicly as a “shitty little country” by theFrench ambassador to Britain.

These beliefs permeate the vocabulary of Israel-hatred on campus, andare dangerous and troubling not merely because they vilify the MiddleEast’s only democracy and America’s principal ally in that region; they arealso of concern because they are based on misrepresentations of history;exaggerate current conditions in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza; and, mostseriously, put forward a complete inversion of truth that enables Israel-hat-ers to load cruel and destructive invective on Zionism without apology,while in reality they are promulgating vile opprobrium that frequentlyshows its true face as raw antisemitism.

In The Return of Anti-Semitism, Gabriel Schoenfeld noted how lan-guage itself has become a form of “turnspeak”; that the “. . . language inwhich such accusations are leveled is extravagantly hateful, drawn from thevocabulary of World War II and the Holocaust but grotesquely inverted,with the Jews portrayed as Nazis and their Arab tormentors cast in the roleof helpless Jews.”1

THE NEW ACADEMIC FACE OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST HATRED

The unending streams of venom regularly hurled at Israel by academ-ics, of course, are rarely positioned as anything other than simple criticismof a particular nation for a set of particular complaints; there is never anyadmission or acknowledgement on the part of Israel’s many world-widecampus critics that anything other than a concern for the Palestinian causeand a dislike of Israel’s current politics are at work in their relentless criti-

1. Gabriel Schoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: EncounterBooks, 2004).

2011] ANTISEMITISM AND THE CAMPUS LEFT 409

quing of the Middle East’s only democracy. In fact, when confronted withthe suggestion that their excessive and compulsive demonization of Israel—along with continual attempts to hobble, weaken, or dismantle the Jewishstate on behalf of social justice for Palestinians—might sometimes be seenas antisemitic in cause or intent, the academic enemies of Israel bristle withindignation and often make wild claims that the dreaded “Israel Lobby” hasattempted to silence them and stifle critical discussion about Israeli/Pales-tinian politics.

But, in fact, it has thankfully become more difficult for actualantisemites on campus to inoculate themselves with this defense by merelycontending that they are not self-professed antisemites, but simply wish torant against Israel’s existence based on a higher moral calling to protect theself-determination of Palestinians. For many actual antisemites, as well asthose who merely loathe Israel, deranged enmity toward the Jewish statehas become a covert, and surrogate, form of antisemitism itself, a fact thatwas addressed in a 2005 “working definition of antisemitism” produced bythe European Union Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia(EUMC), which itself had evolved from a comprehensive study ofantisemitism in the EU it had completed in the previous year.

The term “working definition” was significant, not only because itaffirmed the importance of guarding against the classic strains ofantisemitic sentiment, language, and action, but also because it created anexplicit equivalence between the hatred and demonization of Israel andZionism and a yet another stream of Jew-hatred, what is now sometimescalled the “new antisemitism.”

So while the EUMC working definition acknowledged the older mani-festations of Jew-hatred such as “Rhetorical and physical manifestations ofantisemitism . . . directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/ortheir property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facili-ties,”2 it also provided a more comprehensive view of antisemitic inclina-tions, deeply relevant to the current discussion, when it went on to suggestthat “such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as aJewish collectivity,” or “[m]aking . . . allegations about . . . the power ofJews as collective—such as . . . the myth about a world Jewish conspiracyor of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societalinstitutions [as is often brought up in accusations of a Israel Lobby workingbehind the scenes, for example].”3

2. The European Forum on Antisemitism, “Working Definition of Antisemit-ism,” 2008, http://www.european-forum-on-antisemitism.org/working-definition-of-antisemitism/english/?fontsize=0.

3. Schoenfeld, The Return.


Even more relevant was the EUMC language, which linked anti-Israelideology and radicalism with antisemitism, including examples of the spe-cific types of speech and behavior that animates the anti-Israel ideology ofacademia. Specifically, that would include:

• Denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., byclaiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.

• Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behavior notexpected or demanded of any other democratic nation.

• Using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism(e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterizeIsrael or Israelis.

• Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of theNazis.

• Holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state ofIsrael.4

A look at the prevailing ideologies on campuses will reveal that theseprecise tropes and biases against Israel and Jews currently define the aca-demic left, and are manifested in virulent teaching, writing, activism, schol-arship, and other academic activities, purportedly in pursuit of social justicefor the long-suffering, perennially victimized Palestinians.

Why the animus against democratic Israel in academe as the nationdefends itself from an unending campaign of aggression from Arab coun-tries? One trend that has permeated the university—and that has had a sub-sequent influence on the way Israel is perceived—was the coming of twowatchwords of higher education: diversity and multiculturalism. Diversityhas seen administrations bending over backward to accommodate the sensi-tivities of minorities and perceived victims of the majority culture—usuallyat the expense of fairness and rationality. Multiculturalism has brought withit a type of moral relativism in which every country or victim group isequal, regardless of what vagaries, weaknesses, or fundamental evil mayunderpin its social structure.

Thus, the decades-old emphasis on bringing multiculturalism to cam-puses has meant that faculty as well as students have been seeped in anideology that refuses to demarcate any differences between a democraticstate struggling to protect itself (such as Israel) and aggressive, genocidalfoes who wish to destroy it with their unending assaults (such as Hamas andHezbollah). For the multiculturalist left, the moral strengths of the two par-ties are equivalent, even though the jihadist foes of Israel, for example, have

4. Schoenfeld, The Return.


waged an unending struggle with the stated aim of obliterating the Jewishstate through the murder of Jews.

Thus, this inclination to worship multiculturalism forces liberals tomake excuses for those cultures that have obvious, often irredeemable,moral defects, such as the Islamist foes who currently threaten Israel andthe West. “The believer cannot accept the truth about Islamism or much ofIslam,” observed Jamie Glasov in his recent book, United in Hate: TheLeft’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror, “because he would then have toconcede that not all cultures are equal, and that some cultures (e.g.,America’s, with its striving for equality) are superior to others (e.g., Islam’sstructure of gender apartheid). For the believer to retain his sense of pur-pose and to avoid the collapse of his identity and community, such thoughtsmust be suppressed at all cost.” One way these truths are “suppressed,” saysGlasov, is in those instances when liberals make their seemingly irrationaljudgments about the essential worth of clearly defective culures—the con-struction of a curious double standard when looking at cultures other thantheir own Western models.5

The visceral hatred by the left toward their favorite hobgoblins, impe-rialist America and its codependent oppressor, Israel, finds similar expres-sion from other left-leaning, Israel-loathing professors, such as Universityof Michigan’s Juan Cole, whose regular rants in his blog, Informed Com-ment, take swipes at Israeli and American defense, while simultaneouslyexcusing Arab complicity in violence or terror. In fact, according to Cole, itis the militancy of the West that causes the endemic problems in the MiddleEast, and marks America guilty for its moral and financial support of Israel.“When Ariel Sharon sends American-made helicopter gunships and F-16sto fire missiles into civilian residences or crowds in streets,” Cole wrote in2004, “as he has done more than once, then he makes the United Statescomplicit in his war crimes and makes the United States hated amongfriends of the Palestinians. And this aggression and disregard of Arab lifeon the part of the proto-fascist Israeli right has gotten more than one Ameri-can killed, including American soldiers.”6 There is, of course, no mentionin Cole’s fantasies about why American or Israeli soldiers would beinvolved in military actions in the first place, affirming the view that it isWestern imperialism and oppression that disrupt and embroil the otherwisetaciturn political state of the Arab world.

5. Jamie Glasov, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror(Los Angeles: WND Books, 2009).

6. Juan Cole, “Have Arabs or Muslims Always Hated Jews?” Informed Com-ment, December 14, 2004, http://www.juancole.com/2004/12/have-arabs-or-muslims-always-hated.html.


Violence on the part of the oppressed is accepted by liberals because itis deemed to be the fault of the strong nations whose subjugation of thosedefenseless people is the cause of their violent resistance. In fact, whenleftist professors, such as Columbia University’s Joseph Massad, apologizefor Palestinian terror, they justify it by characterizing the very existence ofIsrael as being morally defective, based, in their view, on its inherent racistand imperialist nature—one of EUMC’s definitions of antisemitism. ForMassad in particular, nations that are racist and imperialistic cannot evenjustify their own self-defense, while the victims of such oppressive regimesare free to “resist,” based on the left’s notion of universal human rights—but especially for the weak. “What the Palestinians ultimately insist on isthat Israel must be taught that it does not have the right to defend its racialsupremacy,” Massad wrote during the 2009 Israeli defensive incursions intoGaza, “and that the Palestinians have the right to defend their universalhumanity against Israel’s racist oppression.”7

Academics’ charge of Israel as racist also enables liberals to excuse themoral transgressions of the oppressed, and, as an extension of that thinking,to single out Israel and America for particular and harsh scrutiny owing totheir perceived “institutionalized” racism and greater relative power. Theself-righteousness the left feels in pointing out Zionism’s essential defect ofbeing a racist ideology insulates it from having to also reflect on Arab trans-gressions, since, as Ruth Wisse has pointed out in If I Am Not for Myself:The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews, liberals can excuse their own betrayal ofIsrael by holding it fully responsible for the very hatreds it inspires.“Ascribing to Israel the blame for its predicament, democratic countries canpursue their self-interest free of any lingering moral scruple,” Wisse said.“Israel is examined for its every moral failing to justify policies of disen-gagement, while the moral failings of Arab countries are considered noone’s business but their own, so that their blatant abuses of human rightsshould not get in the way of realpolitick.”8

The charge of racism against Israel, of course, has been increasinglyuttered by the Jewish state’s enemies, particularly after the 1975 UnitedNations’ invidious proclamation that “Zionism is racism,” thereby brandingthe very ideological existence of Israel as a racist act. “This issue [of Israel]boils down to racism,” Julian Perez, a member of Yale University’s Stu-dents for Justice in Palestine wrote in the Yale Daily News, one of manyexamples of this widely held view of Israel’s essential racist ideology. “An

7. Joseph Massad, “Israel’s Right To Defend Itself,” The Electronic Intifada,January 20, 2009, http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10221.shtml.

8. Ruth Wisse, If I Am Not for Myself: The Liberal Betrayal of the Jews (NewYork: The Free Press, 1992).


entire indigenous population is being denied their human rights by a colo-nial state that is based on religion and ethnicity,” he concluded, promulgat-ing the myth that Palestinian Arabs were indigenous to the region thatbecame Israel, and that the existence of the Jewish state further deniesArabs rights they would otherwise be enjoying had Israel not existed.9

Of the many libels from the world community against Israel, perhapsnone has gained such traction on campuses as the accusation that the Jewishstate now practices apartheid, that the checkpoints, security barrier, Israeli-only roads, barricades, and other remnants of occupation are tantamount toa racist system that victimizes the indigenous Palestinians, just as SouthAfrican apartheid oppressed and devalued indigenous blacks while strip-ping them of them civil rights. The same left-leaning activists from univer-sities who carried the banner against the South African regime have nowraised that same banner—with the same accusatory language—and super-imposed on Israel that it is yet another apartheid regime oppressing ThirdWorld victims. Occasionally, the racism libel against Israel is momentarilysoftened, as happened when the controversial Judge Richard Goldstone(author of the Goldstone Report on the Gaza War, which severely rebukedIsrael’s actions in Operation Cast Lead) announced in a November 2011 op-ed in The New York Times that “In Israel, there is no apartheid.” But theapartheid charge still resonates effectively on campuses and is used as atheme for continuing to demonize Israel and call into question the Jewishstate’s moral standing in the community of nations.

This moral self-righteousness about Israeli racism from the left hastrickled down to campuses, where the same language is frequently heard aspart of student-run protests, divestment campaigns, class for boycotts, andIsrael-bashing in general. Former Bard professor Joel Kovel, the anti-Zion-ist who advocates dismantling Israel completely through the creation of asingle, binational state, was direct in his denunciation of Israel’s existentialsins, including the complicity of the United States in the oppression of thePalestinians under what he too describes as an apartheid system. “Therecent efforts of activists to publicize the parallels between Israel andapartheid South Africa, then, are an essential element in the one-state strat-egy,” Kovel told an interviewer. “The anti-Israeli-apartheid campaign isenergizing forces of opposition across the world to build a powerful politi-cal movement to oppose Zionism and its lobbyists in the major capitalist/imperialist countries. This is significant, because Israel simply cannot sus-tain itself without the support of the capitalist/imperialist powers, the

9. Julian Perez, “Divest Now from a Racist Government,” Yale Daily News,November 15, 2002, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2002/nov/15/divest-now-from-a-racist-government.


United States in particular. Its current prosperity is entirely dependent onthem.”10

This kind of language in academia helps reinforce the left’s notion thatthe imperialism of Western nations is once again responsible for setting upracist, oppressive caste systems in developing countries, systems that haveto be dismantled through protest, resistance, and divestment campaigns. Ithas also formed the basis of divestment petitions that become “workingdocuments” in the strategic vilification of Israel. A January 2003 documentcreated by New Jersey Solidarity and the Rutgers University Campaign forDivestment from Israeli Apartheid, “Acting for Human Rights, Taking aStand for Justice,” for instance, proclaimed that “The world, and specifi-cally the United States, can no longer be silent about the criminal Israeliregime. Conceived by colonial powers without the consent of the indige-nous Palestinian people, the State of Israel has continued to pursue its insti-tutionalized policies of racism, discrimination and oppression.” What’smore, the petition claimed, the United States, in providing continuous finan-cial support for Israel, was directly responsible for the social injustices tak-ing place in the occupied territories. “Unlike other countries receivingforeign aid,” the petition continued, “Israel’s aid is unencumbered withrestrictions—thus, it may be used directly to promote settlements, engage inmilitary incursions inside the occupied territories, and other acts in violationof international law.”11

The much-reviled security barrier, which Israel began building aroundthe West Bank in 2005 as a tactic to reduce terror attacks on its citizenry(and which has been successful in reducing the frequency of those attacksby 90 percent), is, in the eyes of Israel’s critics, not a means of defense, butwhat is indiscriminately termed the “apartheid wall,” a type of racial fencebuilt merely to create Palestinian “Bantustans,” which segregates Jews fromArabs, and which is, for many, emblematic of Israel’s never-ending ambi-tion to “steal” Arab land, disrupt Palestinian life, and expand its Zionistdream to ever-broader borders. “Today in Palestine,” Humza Chowdhry, agraduate student at San Jose State University, wrote in the school’s newspa-per, the Spartan Daily, “an apartheid wall continues to be constructed

10. Joel Kovel, “The One-State Solution: Zionism and the Future of Israel/Pal-estine,” Briarpatch, July 20, 2007, http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/the-one-state-solution-zionism-and-the-future-of-israelpalestine.

11. New Jersey Solidarity; Rutgers University Campaign for Divestment fromIsraeli Apartheid. Divestment for Israeli Apartheid: Acting for Human Rights, Tak-ing a Stand for Justice, 2003, http://www.rutgersdivest.org/whydivest.html.


around the region with land grabs at every corner cutting through collegecampuses and dividing families.”12

Thus, the charge of apartheid is valuable to Israel’s detractors, for itboth devalues the nation by accusing it of perpetuating what is to the leftthe greatest crime—racism—in the form of apartheid, which Israel enforceswith the complicity of the United States, while simultaneously absolvingArabs of responsibility for the onslaught of terror they continue to inflict onIsrael. By pointing to the weakness of the oppressed Palestinians against thesuperior military and economic might of Israel, the rationale that the wallwas built for as a security measure is made to look ridiculous, as if Israelhas nothing to fear by being surrounded by a sea of jihadist foes bent on itsdestruction.

Coupled with academia’s fervent desire to make campuses sociallyideal settings where racial and cultural strife cease to exist is the othernewly popular impulse: to inculcate students with a longing for what iscalled “social justice,” a nebulous term, lifted from Marxist thought, thatempowers left-leaning administrators and faculty with the false ethicalsecurity derived from feeling that they are bringing positive moral and ethi-cal precepts to campuses.

For the left, according to conservative commentator David Horowitz,social justice is “the concept of a world divided into oppressors andoppressed.”13 Those seeking social justice, therefore, do so with the inten-tion of leveling the economic, cultural, and political playing fields; theyseek to reconstruct society in a way that disadvantages the powerful and theelites, and overthrows them if necessary—in order that the weak and dis-possessed can acquire equal standing. In other words, the left yearns for autopian society that does not yet exist, and is willing to reconstruct andoverturn the existing status quo—often at a terrible human cost—in thepursuit of seeking so-called “justice” for those who, in their view, havebeen passed over or abused by history.

In the mind of the academic left, coming out of years of seeking socialjustice and diversity for everyone by applying low standards to all, there areno superior national behaviors; all nations are equal in value and in thecourt of world opinion.

Professor Bruce Thornton of California State Fresno saw an intellec-tual defect on the part of left-leaning academics who serve up these apolo-

12. Humza Chowdhry, “The Holocaust of Our Era,” Spartan Daily, March 18,2008, http://spartandaily.com/2.14808/letter-to-the-editor-the-holocaust-of-our-era-1.1935770.

13. David Horowitz, Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left(Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2004).


gies for terror on behalf of the heroic self-determination of the Palestinians,and who see homicidal attacks on Israeli civilians at cafes and on buses asbeing the same rational actions as the defensive actions of the Israeli gov-ernment in trying to protect its populace from attack. Leftists not onlyequate the acts of violence from both sides; they also give greater credibil-ity from the nihilistic violence of terror out of what Thornton called “thesentimental Third-Worldism that idealizes the non-Western ‘other,’ ” andfrom another troubling trend in the politics of the left, what he observed as“the juvenile romance with revolutionary violence.”14

This rationalization that violence is an acceptable, if not welcome,component of seeking social justice—that is, that the inherent “violence” ofimperialism, colonialism, or capitalism will be met by the same violence asthe oppressed attempt to throw off their oppressors—is exactly the style ofself-defeating rationality that has proven to be an intractable part of theage’s war on terror. This trait, in which leftists flirt with a romanticized ideaof insurrection and violence, seems to confirm Jamie Glazov’s thesis thatthe left’s current “romance with Islamism is just a logical continuation ofthe long leftist tradition of worshipping America’s foes . . ., with militantIslamism now viewed as a valiant form of ‘resistance’ against Americanimperialism and oppression.” For Glasov, sympathy for jihadists is part ofan enduring ideological legacy, and “the Left clearly continues to beinspired by its undying Marxist conviction that capitalism is evil and thatforces of revolution are rising to overthrow it—and must be supported.”15

Stanford University’s Joel Beinin, for instance, a self-avowed Marxistand former president of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, specifi-cally excused Palestinian violence during the first Intifada in a piece enti-tled “Was the Red Flag Flying There?” “Palestinian attacks on civilians(and even armed soldiers) were widely condemned as terrorism by interna-tional opinion and media,” Beinin wrote, but terrorism was clearly the“Palestinians’ primary weapon of resistance” given the political impedi-ment they faced—namely, the “colonialist thrust of the Zionist project,” andthe complicity of hegemonic, imperialist powers in inspiring the terrorwrought against them.16

14. Bruce Thornton, “High Anxiety: How Modernity Feeds Arab Anti-Semi-tism,” VictorHanson.com, December 20, 2006, http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/thornton122006PF.html.

15. Glasov, United in Hate.16. David Horowitz, “Joel Beinin: Apologist for Terrorism,” FrontPage

Magazine.com, May 19, 2006, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=4357.


When he did admit to Palestinian terrorism, Beinin wove a fabuloustale about relatively innocent stone-throwing on the part of restless Arabteenagers that escalated into violence and the death of civilians on bothsides only after Israel’s disproportionate and unreasonable response to pro-tect its citizens from being murdered. “The typical pattern for the first sev-eral weeks of the intifada was that Palestinian civilians engaged in peacefulprotest marches,” Beinin wrote, attempting to make the jihadists seem Gan-dhi-like in their non-violent approach to social change. Beinin admits, how-ever, that “toward the end of the protests, youths taunted and threw stonesat Israeli troops . . .,” causing the “soldiers [to fire] on stone-throwers andnon-stone-throwers alike, rapidly escalating their responses . . . .”17

Similarly, Joel Kovel has seen terrorism as the logical, and excusable,end result of occupation—something for which, in his view, not only Israe-lis but all Jews must share in the blame. “Why have a substantial majorityof Jews,” he wrote in Tikkun magazine, “chosen to flaunt world opinion inorder to rally about a state that essentially has turned its occupied lands intoa huge concentration camp and driven its occupied peoples to such grue-some expedients as suicide bombing?”

Most curious has been the betrayal of Israel by some liberal Jewishacademics, who, poisoned by a pathology that enables them to deflect thehatred of others by absorbing it themselves, have reacted by attacking theJewish state, the hatred of which is unavoidably tarring them as Jews, in aprejudice they are unwilling to have directed at them. As one example, Pro-fessor Jennifer Lowenstein, director of Middle Eastern studies at the Uni-versity of Wisconsin, glorified Palestinian resistance and the yearning forArab self-determination while describing Israel as a nation that “speakswith a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose headshall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and secur-ity.” Then there was the late Tony Judt, of New York University, whoclaimed that Israel is “an oddity among nations,” which no one wants tohave in existence “because it is a Jewish state in which one community—Jews—is set above others, in an age when that sort of state has no place,”ultimately meaning that as a Jew, Judt will have to suffer the moral scoldingof the world’s antisemites on behalf of Israel’s sin of merely existing—something he is disinclined to do.18 Echoing one of Israel-haters’ currentfavorite slanders is Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international lawand policy at Princeton University and the UN’s preposterously titled “Spe-cial rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories

17. Horowitz, “Joel Beinin.”18. Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” The New York Review of Books, Octo-

ber 23, 2003.


occupied since 1967,” who wondered if it was “an irresponsible overstate-ment to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazirecord of collective atrocity?” on the part of Israel, and then quicklyanswered his own question by saying, “I think not.”19

SAIDISM AND THE ACADEMIC ROOTS OF PALESTINIANISM

Were it not for Edward W. Said, the Palestinian cause may haveechoed through the halls of the United Nations, and influenced diplomacyand statecraft in the Middle East and in the West, but never have capturedthe imagination of academe. Said, a professor of comparative literature atColumbia University, published in 1978 a provocative and highly influen-tial book, Orientalism, that not only had a profound effect on the directionof Middle East studies here and abroad, but eventually provided a founda-tion for the intellectual aspect of Palestinianism, and inspired reverencefrom the left and the intellectual elite.

Orientalism gave expression to Said’s belief that the West’s perceptionof the Middle East—indeed, the way the East was understood—was theproduct of cultural imperialism, the tendency, in his view, of Westernscholars, artists, writers, sociologists, archeologists, and others to define theEast based on its presumed cultural, racial, intellectual, and political inferi-ority. Not only was this practice endemic in the West’s relations with theEast, but it represented an insidious aspect in the study and understandingof the Orient by the Occident—that is, Orientalism was, in Said’s words, “aWestern style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over theOrient.” More pointedly, Said announced that no European was even capa-ble of studying the East without superimposing his or her own culturalbiases and “intellectual imperialism,” leading Said to the breathtaking thesisthat “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was . . . aracist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”20

Here, Zionism is the “construct” superimposed on the East (and thehapless Palestinians) by the imperialistic West, another form of aggressiveOrientalism. The act of dispossession is itself a violent, racist act, Saidasserted, based on the assumption that Western colonial settlers can create anarrative that empowers them and deprives the Eastern “other” of his prop-erty and history. Orientialism empowered non-Westerners to believe in theinherent racism and imperialism of Western scholarship and politics, and,according to Martin Kramer in his insightful book, Ivory Towers on Sand:

19. Richard Falk, “Slouching Toward a Palestinian Holocaust.” Middle East,June 29, 2007.

20. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).


The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, is one of Said’s lastingcontributions to the intellectual climate on campuses when scholars tooksides on issues affecting the Middle East. Orientalism, according to Kramer,“also enshrined an acceptable hierarchy of political commitments, with Pal-estine at the top, followed by the Arab nation and the Islamic world. Theywere the long-suffering victims of Western racism, American imperialism,and Israeli Zionism—the three legs of the orientalist [sic] stool.”21

Once the Saidian post-colonialists could neutralize the impact of theWest in its assessment of the Orient (which for Said and his disciples hadcome to mean specifically the Middle East), they initiated an entire intellec-tual enterprise that devalued any scholarship conducted by Westerners,called into question the justice of the imposition of Western culture on non-Western nations, and, in the case of Israel, denounced the creation of thisEuropean, colonial settler-state, a cultural “construct” in the midst of thepassive, less powerful Muslim world. M. Shahid Alam, for instance, a pro-fessor of history at Northeastern University, regularly rants in the virulentonline journal Counterpunch about the perfidy of Israel, echoing Said’sdelineation of the hegemonic, racist West imposing its cultural will on theEast. “This is the language of racial superiority[,] the doctrine that believesin a hierarchy of races,” Alam wrote about Israel, “where the higher raceshave rights and inferior races are destined for extinction or a marginal exis-tence under the tutelage of higher races. Under the Zionist doctrine, theJews are a higher race . . . This superiority is also empirically established:the Zionists wanted to take Palestine from the Palestinians and they made ita fact.”22

Said’s charge of Orientalism also stripped Western scholars of theirstanding in Middle Eastern studies, discrediting them and their potentialcontribution to scholarly inquiry because of their innate biases and Oriental-ist orientation. If Western academics were no longer able to conduct schol-arship about the Orient that was authentic and valid, who, then, could? Theanswer, of course, was clear: Middle Easterners and Arab-Americans, who,after the publication of Orientalism, began to fill the academic slots indepartments of Middle Eastern studies in increasing numbers in a type ofacademic affirmative action program.

The language of the “scholarship” of these post-colonial academics isoften harsh, and, when involving Israel, sometimes borders on the kind of

21. Martin Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Stud-ies in America (Washington, DC: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy,2001).

22. M. Shahid Alam, “How to Be a Good Victim,” Counterpunch, August 27-28, 2005, http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/08/27/how-to-be-a-good-victim.


raw, antisemitic ranting that is constant in the state-controlled media of theArab world. As an example, Hamid Dabashi, Hagop Kevorkian Professor ofIranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia, ensconced in thesame department where Said himself once sat, wrote a psychobabble-fillednarrative during a visit to Israel. Published in Al-Ahram Weekly, it dehu-manizes the entire Jewish state in language that drips with repulsive imagesand hatred:

What they call “Israel” is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism,a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to thevery fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what thesepeople have to call their “soul” . . . Half a century of systematic maimingand murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces ofthese people . . . There is . . . a vulgarity of character that is bone-deepand structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture. No people can per-petrate what these people and their parents and grandparents have perpe-trated on Palestinians and remain immune to the cruelty of their owndeeds.23

This lurid, hateful language used in the critiquing of Israel, given aca-demic respectability by an Ivy League professor, has also begun to showitself in the attitudes and language of students—who themselves regularlyengage in half-truths, counter-historical appraisals of Middle Eastern his-tory, and emotional outbursts bordering on what, in a different context,might well be considered antisemitic hate speech.

CHOMSKY, FINKELSTEIN, AND SOME OF ISRAEL’S OTHER

ACADEMIC DETRACTORS

In the morally incoherent pantheon of the academic defamers of Israel,perhaps no single individual has emerged as the paradigmatic libeler, themost vitriolic and widely followed character in an inglorious retinue as Nor-man Finkelstein, late of DePaul University. Finkelstein has loudly and noto-riously pronounced his extreme views on the Middle East, not to mentionhis loathing of what he has called the Holocaust “industry,” something hehas called an “outright extortion racket”; in fact, he blames Jews themselvesfor antisemitism. Writing in Beyond Chutzpah: On the Misuse of Anti-Semi-tism and the Abuse of History, his off-handed, sardonic response to Harvardprofessor Alan Dershowitz’s book, Chutzpah, Finkelstein accused Jewishleadership, a group he defines as a “repellent gang of plutocrats, hoodlums,

23. Hamid Dabashi, “For a Fistful of Dust: A Passage to Palestine,”Al-AhramWeekly, September 23-29, 2004, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/709/cu12.htm.


and hucksters,” of creating a “combination of economic and politicalpower” from which “has sprung, unsurprisingly, a mindset of Jewish supe-riority.” He has called Nobel Prize winner Eli Wiesel, Holocaust survivorand author of Night, a “clown.” What is more, he continued, echoing thefamiliar refrain that it Jews themselves who inspire antisemitism, “from thislethal brew of formidable power, chauvinistic arrogance, feigned (orimagined) victimhood, and Holocaust-immunity to criticism has sprung aterrifying recklessness and ruthlessness on the part of American Jewishelites. Alongside Israel, they are the main fomenters of antisemitism in theworld today.”24

Finkelstein, who was denied tenure at DePaul, has now also adoptedthe position that this professional setback is the direct result of being boldenough to speak up against Zionism and Israel, and he has been punishedinto silence accordingly. Despite this analysis of why his professional aca-demic career has stalled, Finkelstein has now become what WashingtonUniversity professor Edward Alexander called “the dream-Jew of theworld’s anti-Semites,”25 and regularly visits college campuses nationwideto speak at rallies, anti-Israel events, and symposia and conferences whereanti-Israel, anti-American biases infect scholarship and undermine the cred-ibility of the events. In fact, suggested StandWithUs’s Roz Rothstein, Fin-kelstein’s “true occupation is as a member of a traveling circus, a freakshow of anti-Semites who promote anti-Israel propaganda from campus tocampus.”26

While Finkelstein was busy demonizing Israel and America at hismany campus appearances as a lecturer, he coddled homicidal Palestiniansand defended terrorists. In 2009, when Israel was pounding Hamasstrongholds to weaken the terrorist underbelly and minimize the likelihoodof continuing rocket attacks into southern Israeli towns, Finkelstein, withapologetics matching those of Harvard University’s Sara Roy, wildly pro-claimed it was Hamas, not Israel, who had kept the truce and was softeningits rhetoric, and it was Hamas, not Israel, who actually wanted peace.Hamas has pure political intentions and passively yearns for truces and safeborders, according to Mr. Finkelstein, while the invidious state of Israel,fearing moderate Arab foes who would force it into peace, is obdurate, con-

24. Norman Finkelstein, Beyond Chutzpah (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2008), 85.

25. Edward Alexander, “Academics Against Israel: Martin Jay Explains HowJews Cause Anti-Semitism,”Ariel Center for Policy Research.org, December 23,2009, http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/issue1/alexander-1.htm.

26. Roz Rothstein, “Beware the Finkelstein Syndrome.” The Jewish Journal ofGreater Los Angeles, June 8, 2006: http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/beware_the_finkelstein_syndrome_20060609/.


niving, and bellicose. In fact, Finkelstein suggested, Israel was collectivelygoing mad, while everyone else in the rational world yearned for MiddleEastern peace:

I think Israel, as a number of commentators pointed out, is becomingan insane state. And we have to be honest about that. While the rest of theworld wants peace, Europe wants peace, the US wants peace, but thisstate wants war, war and war. In the first week of the massacres, therewere reports in the Israeli press that Israel did not want to put all itsground forces in Gaza because it was preparing attacks on Iran. Thenthere were reports it was planning attacks on Lebanon. It is a lunaticstate.27

If Finkelstein lives in an academic netherworld of political fantasies,conspiracies, and intellectually imbecilic distortions of history and fact, hisspiritual mentor, MIT professor emeritus of linguistics Noam Chomsky, hasinhabited a similar ideological sphere, but has become an even more widelyknown, eagerly followed creature of the Israel-hating, America-hating,antisemitic left. Chomsky’s vituperation against America has been a defin-ing theme in his intellectual jihad, but an obsessive, apoplectic hatred forIsrael has more completely dominated his screeds and spurious scholarship.In all of his work, suggested Paul Bogdaner, an essayist who has exten-sively examined Chomsky’s “scholarly” output, “one theme is constant: hisportrayal of Israel as the devil state in the Middle East, a malevolent institu-tional psychopath whose only redeeming feature is the readiness of its ownleft-wing intelligentsia to expose its uniquely horrifying depravity.”28

And Israeli Jews are not solely responsible for the crimes of the Jewishstate; American Jews, too, in Chomsky’s opinion, share culpability. “In theAmerican Jewish community,” he stated, “there is little willingness to facethe fact that the Palestinian Arabs have suffered a monstrous historicalinjustice, whatever one may think of the competing claims. Until this isrecognized, discussion of the Middle East crisis cannot even begin.”29

Indicting American Jews for the offenses he perceives as having been per-petrated by Israel is another way in which Chomsky allows his rabid anti-Zionism to engulf Diaspora Jews as well, making them morally responsible

27. Selcuk Gultasli, “Norman Finkelstein: Israel Is Committing a Holocaust inGaza,” Today’s Zaman, January 19, 2009, http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/detaylar.do?load=detay&link=164483.

28. Paul Bogdanor, “The Devil State: Chomsky’s War Against Israel,”PaulBogdanor.com, December 17, 2009, http://www.paulbogdanor.com/chomsky/bogdanor.pdf.

29. Noam Chomsky, Peace in the Middle East? Reflections on Justice andNationhood (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.


for the crimes of the Jewish state—with which they may, or may not, shareany affinity. What is more, Jews’ support of Israel, and their abrasive andpowerful presence in the world, are factors contributing to the increase inworld-wide antisemitism—not, of course, the malevolent impulses and psy-chological defects of Jew-hating antisemites themselves.

“Jews in the US are the most privileged and influential part of thepopulation,” Chomsky claimed. Not only that, but with the same sentimentarticulated in such spurious “histories” as The Protocols of the Elders ofZion, or even the Israel Lobby, he asserted that Jews strove for even moreomnipotence, and that “privileged people want to make sure they have totalcontrol, not just 98% control”—the basis of “why antisemitism is becomingan issue. Not because of the threat of antisemitism; they want to make surethere’s no critical look at the policies the US (and they themselves) supportin the Middle East.”30

Jewish power is a repellent notion for Chomsky, just as the hegemonicmight he ascribes to the terror states of Israel and America—not the desta-bilizing barbarism of Islamism—is the scourge of peace. The existence ofIsrael not only subjugates the long-suffering Arabs, but also is driving theentire globe toward annihilation, Chomsky suggested, using the same imageused by Finkelstein of Israel’s having succumbed into a kind of moral mad-ness. Its very psychosis had become a source of power, and the exercise ofthat power would bring about global genocide. “Israel’s ‘secret weapon. . .,’ ” Chomsky wrote, evoking an apocalyptic vision, “is that it maybehave in the manner of what have sometimes been called ‘crazy states’ inthe international affairs literature . . . eventuating in a final solution fromwhich few will escape.”31

ACADEMIC FREE SPEECH AS A COVER FOR CAMPUS ANTISEMITISM

While academics fulminate regularly against Israel and America, givetacit support to these countries’ enemies, and heap vitriol on the Jewishstate and its supporters—much of it approaching or exceeding what wouldbe considered reasonable or rational criticism of a democratic state—theyregularly cloak themselves with the protective shield of “academic freespeech,” that sacrosanct philosophy that has come to mean that liberal aca-demics can express themselves, even loathsomely, and expect no one toquestion their poisonous rhetoric or answer back with a vigorous defense

30. Noam Chomsky, “Anti-Semitism, Zionism, and the Palestinians,” Vari-ant.org.uk, October 11, 2002, http://www.variant.org.uk/16texts/Chomsky.html.

31. Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Pales-tinians (London: Pluto Press, 1999), 468-69.


from the other side. When the left derides Israel and promotes false, biased,or hateful ideas about Zionism, provoking the Israel government, or mili-tary policies, and defenders to speak back (as they did, for instance, whenWalt and Mearsheimer published their controversial study of the “IsraelLobby”) and commentators to call them on their defective views, the com-mon claim is that the outspoken critics of Israel have been “silenced” by theaccusation of antisemitism and that their free speech is being “suppressed.”

It is, of course, perfectly acceptable for academics to question the sta-tus quo and challenge prevailing ideas as they help students to find sometruth amid many ideological options; indeed, that is one of the chief roles ofthe university, and should be. What is not acceptable, and in fact is damag-ing the very core of higher education in its one-sided, doctrinaire approachto learning, is the pattern of lies, contortions, and mistaken assumptionsendemic to discussions about the politics, military actions, and very exis-tence of Israel.

Moreover, while leftist and radical professors profess to be guardingthe tradition of academic freedom and free speech on their campuses, uni-versities as a lot have been subsumed by a rank hypocrisy when it comes toactually balancing competing views from different sides of academicdebates. What has been dubbed “political correctness” is actually the sub-version of the stated goal of promoting the free expression of all viewswithin the university community. What it has come to mean, unfortunately,is that only those views conforming to prevailing political orthodoxies areconsidered to be “acceptable” by the guardians of what may be said andwho may say it.

Unfortunately, concern for Jewish students’ well-being and emotionalsafety do not seem to be viewed with any great alarm by college administra-tions. This has meant that Jewish students at UC Irvine, San Francisco StateUniversity, and York University in Toronto, to name a few schools, havehad to endure being assaulted by waves of anti-Israel propaganda, vitriolicspeeches, hate-fests, and lengthy campaigns of anti-Zionist vilification,including physical intimidation and assaults. University officials have beenslow to address these incidents, and have not regularly taken strong publicmoral stands against the professors and students groups who have conjuredup this odious brew against Israel and Jews.

That does not mean that university administrations are unaware of cer-tain groups’ concerns when their rights or “feelings” are trampled on; itdoes mean that Jewish students—like Caucasians, heterosexuals, Christians,conservatives, or Republicans—are not perceived as being a group needingprotection. So, in the greatest moral fraud perpetrated by universities claim-ing to be diverse and all-inclusive, diversity on most campuses todayencompasses diversity of thought, as Professor Thornton put it, on “a con-


tinuum that starts at liberal and ends at radical leftist.”32 In their mission toprotect the sensibilities and emotional well-being of identified campus vic-tim groups, universities, often violating their own written guidelines andcodes of behavior, have instituted speech codes to prevent what is generallycalled “hate speech” now, but that has become a tactic to marginalize, andexclude, the speech and ideology of those with whom liberals and leftists donot agree. These tactics are evident as Muslim students’ sensibilitiesbecome offended when critics of Islamism come to speak on campuses;administrators now deem offensive behavior and speech to be “harassing”and “intimidating when it is directed at Muslims or Islam,” not merelyexpressive. On college campuses, to paraphrase George Orwell, all viewsare equal, but some are more equal than others.

The moral relativism that imbues academic free speech was clearly atwork on one campus during the tenure of Lawrence Summers as Harvard’spresident between 2001 and 2006. Summers’ ignoble loss of his presidencyconfirmed the reality that, despite its claims to the contrary, academia, evenat hallowed Harvard, was no longer the certain intellectual marketplace foropen discourse and free speech, even on matters of controversy where vig-orous debate and alternate views would be productive.

One of Summers’ defining moral decisions was embodied in his con-troversial 2002 speech, in which he rejected a divestment petition to with-draw funds from Israel signed by, among others, seventy-four Harvardprofessors, many from the College of Arts and Sciences. He observed thatantisemitic and anti-Israel attitudes, once the invidious products of fringegroups and right-wing cranks, had begun to appear on college campuses,that “profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in pro-gressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people,” he saidin the most pointed section of his comments, “are advocating and takingactions that are antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.”

But even as he was cautioning divestment proponents to examine thetrue nature of their attitudes and the ramifications of their actions, Sum-mers, unlike his critics, was willing to let even foolish views be heard. “Weshould always respect the academic freedom of everyone to take any posi-tion,” he said. But, he added, those who take provocative positions have toassume that their views can and will be challenged; “that academic freedomdoes not include freedom from criticism.”33

32. Bruce Thornton, “Ideology Trumps Truth on Campus,” City Journal,November 25, 2007, http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-11-21bt.html.

33. Lawrence Summers, “Address at Morning Prayers,” Cambridge, Massachu-setts, September 17, 2002, http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2002/morningprayers.php.


One thing those on the left despise is being questioned about theirintegrity, and so it was with the indignant petition-signers and their fellowtravelers, who accused Summers of being intellectually oppressive and “sti-fling debate” by questioning the morality of their actions and raising a pointabout the true intent of the divestment effort: singling out Israel specificallyamong all nations for economic sanctions. The offended faculty never for-gave Summers for expressing his opinion, engaging in intellectual inquiry,and naming them for what they were.

That same sensitivity to language about Israel and antisemitism did notseem to faze faculty members and liberals, however, when Harvard’sEnglish department in 2002 invited poet Tom Paulin to speak as a prestigi-ous Morris Gray Lecturer, and did so, according to English Departmentchair Lawrence Buell, to affirm a “belief in the importance of free speech asa principle and practice in the academy.” That of course is a noble andpurposeful role for universities, save for the fact that Paulin, poet and lec-turer at Oxford University, had been quoted articulating the appalling senti-ment that “Brooklyn-born” Jewish settlers [in Israel] should be “shot dead.”He told Egypt’s al-Ahram Weekly, “I think they are Nazis, racists, I feelnothing but hatred for them. I can understand how suicide bombers feel . . .I think attacks on civilians in fact boost morale.”34

In those instances when controversy arises because Israel-hating orantisemitic professors have publicly expressed radical views, not only isthere general silence from most faculty and administrators about how theseviews may have harmed the collegiality of academic community, but manywill reflexively defend the speech, regardless of how outrageous the contentor potentially “hurtful” the message. In January of 2009, for example, atenured sociology professor, William I. Robinson, of the University of Cali-fornia Santa Barbara, sent an odious e-mail to the 80 students in his Sociol-ogy 130SG: The Sociology of Globalization course. Under the heading“Parallel Images of Nazis and Israelis,” the e-mail displayed a photo-col-lage of 42 side-by-side, grisly photographs meant to suggest a historicalequivalence between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its occupation ofGaza and the Third Reich’s subjugation of the Warsaw Ghetto and its treat-ment of Jews during the Holocaust. Robinson sent the e-mail without sup-plying any context for it, nor did it seemingly have any specific relevance toor connection with the course’s content.

Robinson’s e-mail contained the following commentary:

34. Robert F. Worth, “Poet Who Spoke Against Israel Is Reinvited to Talk atHarvard,” The New York Times, November 21, 2002, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/21/education/21POET.html.


I am forwarding some horrific, parallel images of Nazi atrocities againstthe Jews and Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Perhaps the mostfrightening are not those providing a graphic depiction of the carnage butthat which shows Israeli children writing “with love” on a bomb that willtear apart Palestinian children.

Gaza is Israel’s Warsaw—a vast concentration camp that confinedand blockaded Palestinians, subjecting them to the slow death of malnu-trition, disease and despair, nearly two years before their subjection to thequick death of Israeli bombs. We are witness to a slow-motion process ofgenocide . . ., a process whose objective is not so much to physicallyeliminate each and every Palestinian than to eliminate the Palestinians asa people in any meaningful sense of the notion of people-hood.35

In response to the inflammatory e-mail, two students dropped thecourse and immediately filed a complaint with the university’s AcademicSenate’s Charges Committee, and also went to two off-campus advocacygroups, the Anti-Defamation League and StandWithUs. Not surprisingly,charges of “antisemitism” came from some of Robinson’s critics, as well asfrom those who believed, like StandWithUs’s Roz Rothstein, that profes-sors “should [not] be using their class roster to sell their own political opin-ions . . . Our concern,” she said, “is that he abused his position and that itwas unrelated with his class.”36

But many students and professorial colleagues at UCSB immediatelycame Robinson’s defense, forming an ad hoc group called the Committee toDefend Academic Freedom (CDAF) at UCSB, “dedicated to organizingstudents on campus against nationwide campaigns against political repres-sion,” and also resisting what they ominously referred to as a “silencingcampaign” waged against Robinson by outside forces who had undertaken a“flagrant and baseless affronts to academic freedom on this campus and toProfessor Robinson in particular.” In June, five months after the universityhad initiated its investigation into Robinson’s conduct, officials dismissedall charges and terminated the case without any negative findings againstthe sociology professor, and the CDAF smugly asserted that “the charge ofanti-Semitism [was] made in bad faith,” and that “its real purpose is tovilify and stifle any honest critiques of the state of Israel’s policies andpractices.”37

35. Maane Khatchatourian and Jenna Ryan, “Officials Investigate QuestionableEmail,” Daily Nexus, May 21, 2009, http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=19071.

36. Elliott Rosenfeld, “Investigation of Professor Forges Ahead,” Daily Nexus,June 4, 2009, http://www.dailynexus.com/article.php?a=19161.

37. Committee to Defend Academic Freedom at UCSB, “About Us,” 2009,http://sb4af.wordpress.com/about-us/.


Apparently, Professor Robinson shared the committee’s belief that sin-ister, outside “thought policemen” had instigated a campaign of suppressionagainst him. Like professors Matory and Walt at Harvard, Robinson knewexactly where to assign blame for the scrutiny he had undergone as a resultof his provocative e-mail. “The Israel lobby is possibly the most powerfullobby in the United States,” he told the Daily Nexus, UCSB’s student news-paper, repeating the same accusation that is common to those who haveactually acted in an antisemitic way, “and what they do is label any criti-cism of anti-Israeli conduct and practices as anti-Semitic. . . . This cam-paign is not just an attempt to punish me. The Israel lobby is stepping up itsvicious attacks on anyone who would speak out against Israeli policies.”38

So in Professor Robinson’s morally incoherent mind, depicting Israeli Jewsas the new Nazis who are committing genocide against the Palestinians ismerely instructive content for a sociology course, but when those whobelieve that the comparison between Nazis and Jews is a perverse andlibelous reading of historical fact answer back, it is a “vicious attack,” atactic of pro-Israel forces to deflect criticism and obscure the malignancy oftheir deeds.

THE ANTI-ISRAEL ‘HECKLER’S VETO’:SHOUTING DOWN CONSERVATIVE SPEECH

When campus radical and leftist professors are not moaning about howthe dreaded Israel Lobby is attempting to suppress all criticism of Israel, orcomplaining about how any scrutiny of radical Islam, Palestinian terror, orArab intransigency constitutes “hate speech” that will intimidate or harassMuslims, they have found other means to ensure that countervailing opin-ions about Israel and the Palestinians are shut out. With greater frequency,Muslim student groups, radical, anti-Israel professors, and even collegeofficials have taken it upon themselves to either restrict the ability of con-servative or pro-Israel speakers to appear on campuses, or to deny themaccess to a campus altogether.

In October 2009, for example, St. Louis University’s College Republi-cans and Young America’s Foundation had invited conservative authorDavid Horowitz to deliver a talk entitled “An Evening with DavidHorowitz: Islamo-Fascism Awareness and Civil Rights”—but universityadministrators, once again choosing to avoid a close examination of radicalIslam, cancelled Horowitz’s planned appearance.

What St. Louis University’s administration had done in this instancewas essentially to exercise the “heckler’s veto,” shutting down speech with

38. Rosenfeld, “Investigation.”


which it did not agree or that is felt was too controversial for certain pro-tected minorities on campus. Ominously, however, and in seeming contra-diction to the school’s own stated policy “to promote the free and openexchange of ideas and viewpoints, even if that exchange proves to be offen-sive, distasteful, disturbing or denigrating to some,” this particular speechwas suppressed in advance of the event, based on a belief that the speaker’swords would possibly insult Muslim students and inflame their sensibilities.

The school officials’ decision seemed to belie the university’s owncontention, in its “Policy Statement on Demonstrations & Disruption,” thatit “encourages students, faculty and staff to be bold, independent, and crea-tive thinkers,” and that “fundamental to this process is the creation of anenvironment that respects the rights of all members of the University com-munity to explore and to discuss questions which interest them, to expressopinions and debate issues energetically and publicly, and to demonstratetheir concern by orderly means.”

There were troubling issues here, putting aside the basic question offairness of denying certain students, with certain political beliefs, the oppor-tunity to invite speakers to campus to share their views. Horowitz’s speechwas canceled (and he had appeared, by his own account, on more than 400campuses in the past), not because it might contain speech that was demon-strably false or even incendiary, but because some individuals might be“offended” or “intimidated” by speech that they were perfectly free never tohear.

“For me, it was . . . the content,” explained the university’s dean ofstudents, Scott Smith, in rationalizing the decision to rescind Horowitz’sinvitation to speak—“particularly, the blanketed use of the term Islamo-Fascism.”39 The school was also concerned that the speech would be seenas “attacking another faith and seeking to cause derision on campus.” Butwhere does a college administration, whose own institution claims to valuespeech that is even “offensive, distasteful, disturbing or denigrating tosome,” decide that this particular topic—radical Islam—cannot and shouldnot be spoken about? Is this not a relevant discussion in a world where,since 9/11, over 15,000 acts of terror have been committed by murderousradicals in Islam’s name? Does not an ideology that has as its aim the sub-jugation of other faiths and a world-wide caliphate under sharia law, and isfueled by billions in petro dollars, deserve, and in fact require, some cri-tique and evaluation?

39. Kelly Dunn, “Horowitz Speech Rejected by SLU,” The University News,October 1, 2009, http://media.www.unewsonline.com/media/storage/paper953/news/2009/10/01/News/Horowitz.Speech.Rejected.By.Slu-3790132.shtml.


Most disingenuous is how institutions of higher education like St.Louis University, while horrified by the prospect of a David Horowitz visit,use their claims of academic free speech as a cover for regularly bringingoutrageous, out-of-the-mainstream views to campuses—either in student-run organizations, in course materials and teaching philosophies, in thesponsorship of festivals and cultural events, or in the person of controver-sial speakers and artists. For example, the concern over offending certainstudent groups suddenly did not have the same sense of urgency whenspeakers, with views certainly as controversial as Horowitz’s, were enthusi-astically invited to the Washington University campus, notable among themNorman Finkelstein, who spoke in 2007 as part of “Palestine AwarenessWeek,” sponsored by the on-campus group Saint Louis University Solidar-ity with Palestine.

Horowitz had been prevented from speaking and shouted down by ide-ological bullies before. In 2007 at Emory University, as a guest of Emory’sCollege Republicans, Horowitz was scheduled to speak to an audience ofsome 300 people as part of that year’s Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.While boos, catcalls, and shouts of “Heil Hitler” filled the room, and protes-tors stood, backs turned to the stage, Horowitz attempted to deliver hisspeech. Finally, the hecklers, raucous members of radical groups such asAmnesty International, Veterans for Peace, Students for Justice in Palestine,and the Muslim Student Association (MSA) were sufficiently intrusive andbelligerent enough to prevent Horowitz from speaking any further, and thespeech was cancelled as police, finally unable to calm the angry crowd,escorted Horowitz off stage to safety.

Ideological thugs were also present at the University of Chicago inOctober 2009 to greet Israel’s former prime minister Ehud Olmert, who wasinvited to speak at Mandel Hall as part of the King Abdullah II LeadershipLecture series organized by the Harris School of Public Policy. Dozens ofprotestors inside the hall and some 100 outside, from Chicago’s MuslimStudents Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, as well as groupsfrom the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and Northwestern, wereintent on disrupting the speech with catcalls, jeers, and outrageous threatsand condemnation, and were so effective in their incivility that the planned20-minute presentation ran nearly an hour and a half. Police had to forciblydrag a vociferous protestor out the door as others hurled invectives, con-demnation, and epithets at Olmert, calling him a “murderer,” “war crimi-nal,” and “racist.”

One student who had attended the speech, Frank Pucci, a political sci-ence and history major, wrote in the university’s student newspaper, TheChicago Maroon, his view that “Ehud Olmert is not an academic who hap-pens to have a difference of opinion that must be respected; he is responsi-


ble for the deaths of thousands. As the first protester who stood cried out,‘War crimes are not free expression.’ ” Not only that, Pucci claimed, but themere fact that Olmert was invited to speak was insulting and hurtful to thecampus community. In light of the grave moral injustice engendered byOlmert’s presence, “the only responsible course of action is for the Univer-sity of Chicago to apologize to the members of the Arab, Muslim, and pro-Palestinian community for allowing such a blatant display of bias and inso-lence against them.”40

Apparently, no groups of students were hurt and offended by “blatantdisplay[s] of bias and insolence against them” at Yale University, for exam-ple, when a former Taliban member matriculated on campus, or in 2003,when Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center and the Black Student Alli-ance invited Amiri Baraka, former Black Panther and the soon-thereafter-dismissed, and embattled, poet laureate of New Jersey, to speak. It surprisedand annoyed some in the Yale community that Baraka—a virulent anti-white, antisemitic, anti-Establishment leftist—was invited to the universityin the first place, but not Pamela George, assistant dean of Yale College anddirector of the Cultural Center; she drew a comparison between Baraka’shate-filled visit to that of Yoni Fighel, a former Israeli general and soldierwho had come to Yale earlier that semester to engage in apolitical discus-sions on Middle East security and Israel.

Perhaps the comparison was made precisely because Mr. Baraka hadbeen under assault by many who were shocked by the conspiracy-ladenantisemitism of his poem “Somebody Blew Up America,” in which hereferred, among other wild claims, to Israel’s foreknowledge of and com-plicity in the bombing of the World Trade towers. But the poem also hadwords to denigrate American culture, imperialism, the white race, Zionism,and other sinister powers in Baraka’s cynical imagination.

But more revealing than the fact that such a seemingly antisemiticspeaker was invited, and then celebrated, at Yale was the reaction of onestudent whose theory was that the only reason that there was controversyabout Baraka’s poetry and slurs of Jews was because, incredibly, that Jewscontrol the press. Writing one of his regular columns in the Yale DailyNews, Sahm Adrangi decided that, in this case—where, after all, it was onlyIsrael, Jews, and America being slurred—“student groups who invite con-troversial speakers ought to be congratulated, not condemned. Contrarianthinkers and conspiracy theorists,” he mused, “expose us to vantage pointswe rarely encounter in fellow Yalies. Their arguments are often more

40. Frank Pucci, “War crimes Are Not Free Expression,” Chicago Maroon,October 20, 2009, http://www.chicagomaroon.com/2009/10/20/war-crimes-are-not-free-expression#.


sophisticated than we’d expect and in debating them, we gain a deeperunderstanding of our own opinions.”41

That aside, however, the real lesson to be gleaned from incendiaryanti-Israel speakers like Baraka “isn’t really about free speech,” Adrangicautioned; “it’s about how special interests manipulate the public discourseto advance their agendas.” And who were those special interests attemptingto make much ado about Baraka’s poetic ravings? The Jewish press, ofcourse. “Jews tend to sympathize with Israel more so than non-Jews. And inmy three years at the Yale Daily News, Jewish students have comprised amajority of management positions . . . .” Adrangi was quick to point out,however, that he was not suggesting there was a conspiracy among Jewishjournalists to tilt the argument in Israel’s favor. “But,” he asked rhetori-cally, and apparently knowingly, “does the prevalence of Jews in Americanmedia, business and politics help explain America’s steadfast support forIsrael, whose 35-year occupation of Palestinian lands is an affront to humandecency? Of course.”42

THE MUSLIM STUDENT ASSOCIATION AND ANTISEMITIC RADICALISM ON

CALIFORNIA CAMPUSES

If any area of the United States can be identified as the epicenter ofanti-Israelism on campus, California, the nation’s most populous state, cancertainly be said to have earned that dubious distinction. In fact, observersof out-of-control anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity on campuses considerCalifornia’s universities to be the veritable ground zero of such vitriol, withparticularly troubling and persistent problems of radical student groups,venom-spewing guest speakers, annual hate-fests targeting Israel and Jew-ish students, and a pervasive mood on campus in which Jewish students andother pro-Israel faculty and students experienced visceral and real “harass-ment, intimidation and discrimination,” as a 2004 Zionist Organization ofAmerica’s complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for CivilRights described the situation on one campus, the University of CaliforniaIrvine.

In fact, even after the U.S. Office of Civil Rights had initiated their2004 inquiry into rampant antisemitism on campus—including at UCIrvine, a focus of their study—a second similar effort, the “Task Force onAnti-Semitism at the University of California, Irvine,” was launched in

41. Sahm Adrangi, “Not Just Another Conspiracy Theory: ManipulatingAnger,” Yale Daily News, February 26, 2003, http://www.yaledailynews.com/news/2003/feb/26/not-just-another-conspiracy-theory-manipulating.

42. Adrangi, “Not Just Another Conspiracy.”


December 2006 by the Hillel Foundation of Orange County and staffed bylocal professionals, religious leaders, and academics. Feeling that the fed-eral inquiry had uncovered some troubling trends on the Irvine campus, butdelivering a somewhat soft response to the university’s administration, theOrange County task force decided to revisit some of the incidents in anattempt to show a pattern of anti-Israelism and antisemitism as endemic tothe Irvine campus. Its stated goal was “to study, investigate and issue areport on alleged incidents of racism and anti-Semitism at the University ofCalifornia Irvine (UCI). We are not singling out any specific group. We arelooking at all instances of alleged anti-Semitic and racist activity.” The U.S.Office of Civil Rights, as the task force report noted, had focused morespecifically on issues of discrimination based on students’ national origin,and the “investigation applied narrow legally technical analysis aboutwhether UCI violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and itsimplementing regulations.” The task force came to the following conclu-sions, based on their own extensive interviews with students, faculty, andUCI administrators (at least those who agreed to respond to inquiries):

• Jewish students have been subject to physical and verbal harass-ment because they are Jewish and support Israel.

• Hate speech, both direct and symbolic, is directed at Jews by speak-ers and demonstrators.

• An annual week-long event sponsored by the Muslim StudentUnion is an antisemitic hate fest targeting Israel and Jews using liesand propaganda dating back to the antisemitism of the MiddleAges.

• Speakers who are pro-Israel and/or those who condemn speakerswho espouse anti-American and anti-Israeli views are subject todisruptive behavior by Muslim students and their supporters.

• Jewish students state that they are subject to a hostile class environ-ment by faculty members who adopt an anti-Israel bias.

• Materials contained in certain Middle-East studies courses arebiased and indicative of a “leftist” orthodoxy that characterizes thisarea of study.

• The UCI administration is not responsive to complaints by Jewishstudents.

• Jewish students complain of a “double standard” when the adminis-tration enforces campus rules and regulations.43

43. Orange County Task Force, “Report on Anti-Semitism at UCI,” February12, 2008, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/orange-county-task-force-report-on-anti-semitism-at-uci.pdf.


These are troubling assessments, but not at all uncommon on campusesacross the country, and in Canada and Great Britain, as well. Yet, despitethe two protracted investigations into antisemitic activities at UCI, the inci-dence of hate-fests, protests, and incendiary speakers has not subsided.

In fact, in May 2009, the Muslim Student Union continued its traditionof sponsorship of vile, hate-spewing events to further demonize Israel, thistime an 18-day extravaganza offensively named “Israel: The Politics ofGenocide,” which preposterously proclaimed on their posters announcingthe event that Israel has resulted in “61 years of illegal occupation. 61 yearsof statelessness. 61 years of systematic ethnic cleansing. The Palestinianshave lost thousands of lives and millions of have been displaced from theirhomes. Despite all of this, their resolve remains steadfast, their resistanceenduring, their fire unflinching. However, though Israel continues to violateinternational law and inflict these injustices, Palestinian blood stains ourhands, too.” If the astounding claim is made here that the existence of Israelrepresents “61 years of illegal occupation,” then that either exposes a sorelack of historical insight on the part of the sponsors, or, more likely, itreflects the notion held in much of the Arab world that all of Israel—notjust the “occupied territories” gained in 1967—is “occupied” Muslim landand that Israel is therefore “illegal” and not a nation at all.

The “Politics of Genocide” event included speeches by such notoriousfigures as the vitriolic Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali, a black Imam associated withthe Masjid Al Islam mosque in Oakland and the frequent guest of the IrvineMSU. Malik-Ali, former Nation of Islam member, convert to Islam, andcheerleader for Hamas and Hezbollah, has been a ubiquitous, poisonouspresence on the Irvine campus who never hesitates to castigate Israel, Zion-ists, Jewish power, and Jews themselves as he weaves incoherent, halluci-natory conspiracies about the Middle East and the West. As an example,UCI’s student newspaper, The New University, reported that Malik-Ali, in aFebruary 2004 speech, “America under Siege: The Zionist HiddenAgenda,” “implied that Zionism is a mixture of ‘chosen people-ness [sic]and white supremacy’; that the Iraqi war is in the process of ‘Israelization’;that the Zionists had the ‘Congress, the media and the FBI in their backpocket’; that the downfall of former Democratic [presidential] front-runnerHoward Dean was due to the Zionists; and that the Mossad [Israel’s intelli-gence agency] would have assassinated Al Gore if he had been elected [in2000] just to bring Joe Lieberman (his Jewish vice president) to power.”44

Malik-Ali used a February 2005 MSU-organized event to proclaimthat “Zionism is a mixture, a fusion of the concept of white supremacy and

44. Discover the Networks, “Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali,” DisoverTheNetworks.org,http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=2102.


the chosen people.” He complained about Zionist control of the Americanmedia, Zionist complicity in the war in Iraq, and Zionists’ ability to deflectjustified criticism. “You will have to hear more about the Holocaust whenyou accuse them of their Nazi behavior,” he warned, after railing againstZionist control of the press, the media, and the political decisions of theAmerican government. And what was his vision for Israel and the Palestini-ans? “One state. Majority rule. Check that out. Us. The Muslims.”45

In May 2006, speaking from a podium under a banner reading “Israel,the 4th Reich,” Malik-Ali referred to Jews as “new Nazis” and “a bunch ofstraight-up punks.” “The truth of the matter is your days are numbered,” headmonished Jews everywhere. “We will fight you. We will fight you untilwe are either martyred or until we are victorious.”46

Another guest speaker who regularly makes appearances on the MSAhate-fest circuit is Muhammad al-Asi, an antisemitic, anti-America Muslimactivist from Washington, D.C., who has written, among other notoriousideas, that “The Israeli Zionist are [sic] the true and legitimate object ofliquidation.”

At an MSU-sponsored event in February 2008, “From Auschwitz toGaza: The Politics of Genocide,” which tried to draw parallels between theHolocaust and Hamas-controlled Gaza, al-Asi was a featured speaker. In hisremarks, he repeated the canard of Jewish control of world politics, sug-gesting that “Zionists or what some people call the Jewish lobby” hadreduced the United States to playing “second fiddle to the Israeli govern-ment.” This situation had to end, he warned, before the perfidious Zionistsdraw America into yet another war for their own benefit. “How long are wegoing to take the Israeli dog wagging the American tail?” he asked. “Nowthe pro-Zionist, Israeli crowd in the United States says the United Statesshould go to war against Iran.”47

Just months after 9/11, al-Asi had similar invective to utter towardJews, in the context of Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Using his favoriteimage of the ghetto when describing Jews, he observed that, “We have apsychosis in the Jewish community that is unable to co-exist equally andbrotherly with other human beings. You can take a Jew out of the ghetto,but you can’t take the ghetto out of the Jew, and this has been demonstrated

45. Terrorism Awareness Project, “The Muslim Student Union at the Universityof California Irvine,” TerrorismAwareness.org, http://www.terrorismawareness.org/muslim-groups-on-campus/128/the-muslim-student-union-at-the-university-of-california-irvine/.

46. Terrorism Awareness Project, “The Muslim.”47. Anti-Defamation League, “Backgrounder: “Mohammad al-Asi, ADL.org,

http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Israel/al_asi.htm.


time and time again in Occupied Palestine.” What is worse, he continued,this behavior on the part of the malicious Jews would likely continue, since“now they have American diplomats and politicians and decision makersand strategists in their pocket.”48

San Francisco State University is not far behind UC Irvine in the wayit has enabled its Muslim students’ organizations to create a veritable reignof terror on campus against Jewish and pro-Israel students. Most notoriouswas the Muslim student-sponsored, pro-Palestinian April 2002 demonstra-tion at SFSU that included grotesque flyers and posters depicting a deadPalestinian baby on a soup-can label imprinted with the words “Palestinianchildren meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under Americanlicense,” echoing the centuries-old blood libel of European antisemitismthat accused Jews of murdering Gentile children and using their blood tobake matzos—a slander that has, not surprisingly, currently gainedcredence in the Arab world.

Not content just to mount their own vile protests against Zionism,Jews, and Israel, the following month the pro-Palestinian student groupsdisrupted a vigil for Holocaust Remembrance Day, where some 30 Jewishstudents who were reciting the Mourners’ Kaddish—the Jewish prayer forthe dead—were shouted down by protesters, who countered with grislyprayers in memory of Palestinian suicide bombers. The pro-Palestiniancounter-demonstrators, armed with whistles and bull horns, physicallyassaulted the Jewish students, spat on them, and screamed such epithets as“Too bad Hitler didn’t finish the job,” “Get out or we will kill you,” “F**kthe Jews,” “Die racist pigs,” and “Go back to Russia, Jews.” The violenceescalated to the extent that San Francisco police officers finally had to usherthe Jewish students to safety off campus.

Laurie Zoloth, SFSU’s director of the program in Jewish studies at thetime of the incident, described the event in an open letter: “The police coulddo nothing more than surround the Jewish students and community mem-bers who were now trapped in a corner of the plaza, grouped under the flagsof Israel, while an angry, out of control mob, literally chanting for ourdeaths, surrounded us . . . There was no safe way out of the Plaza. We hadto be marched back to the Hillel House under armed S.F. police guard, andwe had to have a police guard remain outside Hillel.”49

In July 2006, SFSU’s General Union of Palestinian Students co-spon-sored with Al-Awda, the Palestine Right to Return Coalition, yet another

48. Anti-Defamation League, “Backgrounder.”49. Melissa Radler, “Anti-Semitic Riot at San Francisco State University,” Free

Republic.com, May 16, 2002, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/684040/posts.


hate-fest against Israel, this time the Fourth International Al-Awda Conven-tion, the overarching ambition of which is to enforce the right of all Pales-tinian refugees to return to their former homes in what is current-day Israel,with the express purpose of demographically eliminating Israel’s Jewishidentity and continued existence. “Racism, tribalism, all the ‘isms’ we’refighting, you cannot exclude Zionism from,” proclaimed Michel Shehadeh,the host of the tellingly named Radio Intifada, a KPFK-FM Los Angelesradio program, and one of the convention’s featured guest speakers. “Ifstruggling against Zionism isn’t at the core of defining yourself as a pro-gressive, then you’re not. You cannot be progressive if you’re not fightingfascism and Nazism. It’s a package. You can’t be selective in this.”50

Al-Awda’s intransigency regarding the mere existence of Israel, and itsradical stance with respect to terrorism and a desire to totally replace thecurrent state of Israel with an Islamic Palestine, are so breathtakinglyextreme that it is difficult to see how any university could look at the toneand content of this conference and pretend that it created productive dia-logue or inspired positive academic debate. It is one-sided and biased in theextreme, and barely disguises the overt antisemitism amid its calls to dis-mantle what it describes as an illegal Zionist regime.

Another of the conference’s speakers, Lamis Jamal Deek, an attorneyand a member of Al-Awda New York, summed up the overriding sentimentof the movement: “There can never be a place for Zionism in the Arabworld . . . Zionism will never be allowed to exist peacefully among thepeople. Today we again demand the end of the Zionist presence in the Arabworld.” At San Francisco State University, such sentiments seem to havefound a welcoming home.

ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK: AN ANNUAL ON-CAMPUS OPPORTUNITY TO

DEMONIZE ISRAEL AND JEWS

Initiated in 2004 at the University of Toronto, Israeli Apartheid Week(IAW) was held in 40 locations worldwide by 2008, with the stated purposeof educating “people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system andto build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of agrowing global BDS movement.”51 IAW uses as its primary tactic what hasbeen referred to the “Durban strategy,” referring to the 2001 anti-Israel

50. Joe Eskenazi, “Vitriolic Anti-Israel Gathering Held at SFSU, Jweekly, July21, 2006, http://www.jweekly.com/article/full/29842/vitriolic-anti-israel-gathering-held-at-sfsu.

51. Israel Apartheid Week, Israel Apartheid Week.org, November 9, 2009,http://apartheidweek.org/en/about.


hate-fest in South Africa, where the representatives of member countriesperversely defined Zionism as racism. Events were held on the campuses ofacademic institutions that included Berkeley, Toronto, Boston College,Yale, Michigan, and Columbia.

In addition to the racism charge, IAW events continue debate on theother thorny issues of the Palestinian question: the “right of return” of allPalestinians to their old homes in what is now present-day Israel, disman-tling the security wall, and forming a binational state in which Jews, then aminority, would be but one class of citizens into whatever type of politicalstructure that state evolved—in short, a world without Israel. Since themotive of the sponsors in producing these events seems pure—endingracism—the stridency of the message and the vitriol of the speakers andmarketing materials of the IAW has ramped up as supporters have becomeemboldened by their mission. In some instances, such as at the Universityof Manitoba in the weeks after the 2009 Gaza incursion by Israel, whensentiments ran high, posters for the event created by the Muslim StudentsAssociation were so extreme that school officials reigned in the incendiarymarketing efforts. “One of them depicted a Jewish fighter plane targeting ababy stroller,” reported a National Post article. “Another featured a carica-ture of a hooked-nosed Hasidic Jew with a star of David, pointing abazooka at the nose of an Arab carrying a slingshot; a third one showed anIsraeli helicopter with a swastika on top, dropping a bomb on a baby bot-tle.” Even on university campuses, where the right to speak offensively andoften seems to be one of the bulwarks of higher education, the grisly andexplicitly antisemitic tone of the posters was all a little too much, the Postreported, and “the school forced their removal the same day.”52

In a statement in which he defended the university’s decision to permitthe event, Deputy Provost and Vice-Provost of Students David Farrar saidthat despite numerous requests from opponents of the IAW to have theevent canceled, “We will not. To do so would violate the university’s com-mitment to freedom of speech . . . As an academic community, we have afundamental commitment to the principles of freedom of inquiry, freedomof speech and freedom of association . . . [T]he university has no reason tobelieve that the activities will exceed the boundaries for free speech. . . .”53

But that spirit of “freedom of inquiry and freedom of speech” seemedto be absent from the actual goings-on during the event, according to at

52. Craig Offman, “Campuses Awash in Tension over Israel Apartheid Week,”National Post, March 2, 2009, http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=1343206.

53. Graham F. Scott, “Apartheid: Is This the Israel You Know?,” The Varsity,February 3, 2005, http://thevarsity.ca/articles/15158.


least one attendee, Ilan Nachim. “I think it’s one of the most racist presenta-tions I’ve ever seen,” he told the school’s newspaper. “I was not allowed toexpress myself at any point during this evening, from beginning to end. Wehad our hands up, we did not open our mouths. We were not allowed toexpress ourselves. This is what the university calls free speech?”54

More ominously, by 2009 the annual event had so degenerated into aracist, rabid rally that proceedings were closed to cameras and reporters,and individuals who actually attempted to participate in a dialogue aboutthe issues being raised by the event in the first place were confronted withphysical intimidation and threats, encountering the dark side of pro-Palestinianism.

One of these individuals, Isaac Apter, a Jewish alumnus of the Univer-sity of Toronto, recounted how he and others in the audience of one eve-ning’s events quizzed a speaker about why Hamas had persistently refusedto recognize the legitimacy of Israel—“did Israel have the right to exist?”—and when the speaker repeatedly sidestepped the questioning, some audi-ence members shouted out, “Answer the questions!” Apter found himselfapproached from behind by a member of a private guard retained by Stu-dents Against Israel Apartheid, slapped in the head, yanked from his seat,and yelled at with the warning, “You shut the fuck up!” A second Jewishattendee was similarly assaulted that night by one of the hired security teamand given a far more chilling warning, particularly in light of the practice ofbeheadings in the Middle East: “Shut the fuck up or I’ll saw your headoff.”55

In fact, the IAW event, by singling out Israel and attacking it for itsalleged racism, might well be a violation of Canadian and internationallaws. In a paper published in the Jewish Political Studies Review, AviWeinryb suggested that by allowing the IAW events to be held, the Univer-sity of Toronto’s decisions “conflicts with the 2004 European MonitoringCenter on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC)’s working definition of anti-Semitism . . . which includes such examples of anti-Semitism as: denyingthe Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that theexistence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor), [and] applying doublestandards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of anyother democratic nation.”56

The University of Toronto is not the only Canadian institution ofhigher education to become a breeding ground for anti-Israel radicalism.

54. Scott, “Apartheid.”55. Offman, “Campuses Awash.”56. Avi Weinryb, “The University of Toronto: The Institution Where Israel

Apartheid Week Was Born,” Jewish Political Studies Review, December 2008.


There was, notably, the infamous riots at Montreal’s Concordia Universityin September 2002, where mobs of marauding students smashed windowsand destroyed furniture and fixtures to express their displeasure at the invi-tation to Benjamin Netanyahu to speak there. Toronto’s York Universityhas also recently defined itself as having a rabid antisemitic leaning when,in February 2009, some 100 pro-Palestinian students initiated a near-riot,and police had to be called to usher Jewish students to safety after they hadbeen barricaded inside the Hillel offices and were “isolated and threatened,”according to Hillel itself, by the physically and verbally aggressivedemonstrators.

Parroting the morally incoherent and factually incorrect exhortationsof Israel-haters elsewhere of “Zionism equals racism!” and “Racists offcampus!,” the York mob, members of both the York Federation of Studentsand Students Against Israeli Apartheid, demonstrated once again that whatis positioned as “intellectual debate” on campuses about the Israeli/Palestin-ian issue has changed into something that is not really a conversation at all;instead, it is more akin to an ideologically driven shout-fest with a newversion of pro-Palestinian brown shirts. York’s supporters of the cult ofPalestinianism apparently no longer felt even a bit uncomfortable voicingwhat was actually on their minds when the subject of Israel comes up: whenthe York Hillel students were trapped inside locked offices, surrounded byan increasingly violent and aggressive mob, the intellectual “debate” thatday included such raw slurs as “Die Jew—get the hell off campus.”57

That thuggery by anti-apartheid Jew-haters had already become some-thing of a tradition on the York campus. A year earlier, in April 2008, Bar-bara Kay of Canada’s National Post reported that York’s Hillel had invitedthen-Knesset member Natan Sharansky to deliver an address. Not contentwith allowing anyone with a pro-Israel viewpoint to share his or her viewson campus, the Palestinian Students Association and Students AgainstIsraeli Apartheid@York (SAIA) used the common tactic of intellectual bul-lies: they jeered at and shouted Sharansky down, spoke loudly among them-selves during his talk, and generally prevented anyone in the audience fromlistening to the content of the speech—but not before they had articulatedtheir own vitriol with such comments as “Get off our campus, you genoci-dal racist” and “You are bringing a second Holocaust upon yourselves.”58

57. Ron Csillag, “Cops Quell Anti-Israel Attack at Toronto College,” JTA.org,February 13, 2009, http://www.jta.org/news/article/2009/02/13/1002990/cops-quell-anti-israel-attack-at-york-u.

58. Barbara Kay, “York University Must Get Serious about Taking Back TheirCampus from Anti-Zionist Radicals,” National Post, April 16, 2008, http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2008/04/16/165656.aspx.


ISRAEL: THE CANARY IN THE MINESHAFT OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION

The university’s jihad against Israel and Jews is a grim reminder thatthe world’s oldest hatred has not yet vanished; in fact, either because of thewidespread negative attitudes toward Israel, or simply due to a lingering,poisonous Jew-hatred in the Arab world and increasingly in the West aswell, Jews once again are targets of libels, denunciation, demonization, andslurs against Judaism, against Zionism, and against Israel itself, the Jew ofnations.

This hatred metastasized on campus, when it was promulgated by left-ist professors with a reverence for Palestinian victimization and by Muslimstudent groups with a theologically based hatred of the Jewish state. Itspread though being enabled by administrators who allowed their campusesto be hijacked by radicals with the purported objective of elevating the Pal-estinian cause, but whose actual purpose was promoting their own agendafor vilifying and eventually eliminating Israel.

The manifestations of these on-campus hatreds have been obvious andugly: ripped Israeli flags drizzled with blood; Stars of David juxtaposedwith swastikas; charges of apartheid, racism, and genocide leveled againstIsraelis and also assigned to their proxies, American Jews; accusations ofdual loyalties, with American Jews accused of undermining American inter-ests with the covert purpose of assisting Israel; physical threats against Jew-ish students; and blood libels that transform Israelis into murderous,subhuman monsters who almost gleefully shed Arab blood in their insatia-ble quest for land—land that, their critics say, they neither deserve nor forwhich they have any legitimate claim.

The campus war against Israel and Jews is also indicative of the com-promised purpose of higher education, where scholarship has been degradedby bias and extremism on the part of a leftist professoriate with a clearpolitical agenda that cites Israel as the new villain in a world yearning forsocial justice. University leaders and other stakeholders have been notice-ably negligent in moderating this radicalism, either because they are una-ware of how whole fields of study have been hijacked by academic fraudsand morally incoherent scholars, or because they sympathize with the intel-lectual approach of their faculties and have become complicit in the produc-tion of pseudo-scholarship, academic agitprop, and disingenuous “learningexperiences” that have a one-sided, biased approach to understanding theMiddle East, and particularly the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

That all this is taking place in the rarified air of college campuses,where civil discourse is the expected norm and scholarly inquiry is theanticipated intellectual product, makes the seething hatreds and bias againstIsrael and the Jews all the more unexpected and morally dangerous. Only


65 years after one of the most horrific crimes against humanity that saw themurder of some six million souls, the same unsettling tropes against Jewsare being restated, this time often targeting the Jewish state that arose, inpart, from the ashes of the Holocaust. One would hope this battle would nothave to be waged again, that college students, Jews and non-Jews alike,would not have to be confronted with “the longest hatred” once again, thistime conflated with the very survival of a democratic Jewish state, precari-ously coexisting amid a sea of jihadist foes who seek its very elimination.

*Richard Cravatts, PhD, is professor of practice and director of the Master’s Pro-gram in Communications Management at the Simmons College School of Manage-ment. Dr. Cravatts is the author of the forthcoming Genocidal Liberalism: TheUniversity’s Jihad Against Israel and Jews; in addition, he has published over 350articles, op-ed pieces, columns, and chapters in books on antisemitism, anti-Israel-ism, higher education, and campus free speech, terrorism, Constitutional law, polit-ics, and social policy. He is a board member of Scholars for Peace in the MiddleEast, the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, the Investigative Taskforce onCampus Anti-Semitism, and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights underLaw.

Antisemitism at the University of California

Leila Beckwith*

Antisemitic speech and actions have occurred on the University of Cali-fornia (UC) campuses for more than ten years, initiated by registeredMuslim and pro-Palestinian student groups and some faculty. Jewishorganizations and individual members of the California Jewish commu-nity have urged the administration to enact and implement policies toprotect Jewish students from harassment and intimidation. The presentpaper analyzes the responses of the university administration to the prob-lem: the degree to which antisemitism is acknowledged, identified, com-batted, and condemned. The analysis shows the administration to beaverse to acknowledging antisemitism; therefore, its policies in combat-ting anti-Jewish bigotry are incoherent and ineffective.

Key Words: Antisemitism; Muslim Student Association; Olive Tree Initia-tive; Students for Justice in Palestine; University of California

The crown jewel of California’s public higher education system is theUniversity of California (UC). Yet, bigotry against Jewish students hasoccurred on University of California campuses over many years and onmany campuses. Jewish students have been subjected to: acts of physicalaggression; intimidation; swastikas; speakers, films, and exhibits that useantisemitic imagery and discourse; speakers that praise and encourage sup-port for terrorist organizations; the organized disruption of events that Jew-ish student groups had sponsored; and the promotion of student resolutionsfor divestment from Israel that demonize and delegitimize the JewishState.1

1. See Kenneth Marcus, “A Blind Eye to Campus Anti-Semitism,” Commen-tary, September 2010; “Campus Anti-Semitism: Briefing Report,” United StatesCommission on Civil Rights, Washington, D.C., July 2006; “Muslim StudentsAssociation: The Investigative Project on Terrorism Dossier,” The InvestigativeProject on Terrorism, http://www.investigativeproject.org/documents/misc/84.pdf;“Emerging Anti-Israel Trends and Tactics on Campus,” Anti-Defamation League,October 2011, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Israel/campus_anti_israel_trends_activity.htm; “Anti-Semitism at UC Irvine,” Anti-Defamation League, July 27,2010, http://www.adl.org/main_Anti_Israel/Anti-Semitism+at+UC+Irvine.htm;“Task Force on Anti-Semitism at the University of California, Irvine Report,”Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism at the University of Cal-

443


OFFICIAL POLICY AND THE UC COMMUNITY

Discrimination against Jews, of course, is not a policy of the Univer-sity of California. Old-fashioned antisemitism, in which a quota existed forJewish students and the number of Jewish students and Jewish faculty weredeliberately minimized, no longer exists in the United States. In fact, Jewishstudents and faculty, although members of a very small ethnic/religiousminority among the American populace, exist in disproportionately highernumbers at UC. The overwhelming majority of UC students, faculty, andstaff show no antisemitic attitudes or feelings. Yet, some campuses havebecome places in which hostility is shown to Jews and the Jewish state.

THE EXISTING HOSTILITY

This hostility is often manifested in the guise of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism. Whereas historically antisemitism was manifested under a relig-ious guise, then a racial guise, it is now evidenced in a political/ideologicalguise. What is often disguised as “legitimate” criticism of the Jewishnation’s policies frequently morphs into the tropes of classical antisemitism,such as blood libels and Jews controlling the United States. As BernardLewis2 points out, the political aspect is marked by the same two featuresthat mark classical antisemitism: Jews and/or the Jewish state are portrayedand accused of cosmic evil; Jews and/or the Jewish state are judged by astandard different from that applied to others.

Is the University of California atypical among American universities inits manifestation of antisemitism? It is unlikely that UC is an exception. Aswill be seen in the following sections, the sources of antisemitic acts anddiscourse on campus are Muslim and pro-Palestinian student groups, aswell as some individual faculty and staff. Those agents share a commonideology, exist in universities across the United States, and make it likelythat animus against Jews will occur at least sporadically.

Some of UC’s characteristics, however, may fuel the depth and extentof manifestations of anti-Jewish bigotry. One such element, as pointed outby Alvin Rosenfeld,3 the left-wing political culture on the West coast

ifornia, Irvine, 2008, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2008/02/orange-county-task-force-report-on-anti-semitism-at-uci.pdf.

2. Bernard Lewis, “The New Anti-Semitism,” The American Scholar, 75(Winter 2006):25-36.

3. Alvin Rosenfeld, “Responding to Campus-Based Anti-Zionism: Two Mod-els,” in Anti-Semitism on the Campus: Past and Present, ed. Eunice G. Pollack(New York: Academic Studies Press, 2011).

2011] ANTISEMITISM AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 445

allows ideologically extreme positions to be influential; a significant threadin left-wing discourse is obsessive pro-Palestinian/anti-Israelism. Two, thestudents and faculty at UC are heirs of the “Free Speech” movement, initi-ated and organized by some students at UC Berkeley in 1964-1965. Themovement, through a series of acts of civil disobedience, successfully brokethe administration’s ban on campus political activities by students; its suc-cess unleashed student groups to engage in and advocate for politicalcauses. Activist politics by students on campus probably contributed to theloosening of restrictions on faculty. The broadening of the UC academicfreedom rules for faculty in 2003, directly related to allowing pro-Palestin-ian propaganda in an official university course, allows faculty to engage inpolitical advocacy in classrooms and official university events.4

SOURCES OF HOSTILITY TO JEWS AND ISRAEL

Student groups.5 Two officially registered student groups at the Uni-versity of California, the Muslim Student Association, sometimes namedthe Muslim Student Union (MSA/MSU), and the Students for Justice inPalestine (SJP), exert considerable influence in promoting a hostile anti-semitic environment. The student groups are supported by mandatory feesthat are collected from every student, although most UC students wouldcondemn antisemitism. The MSA/MSU exists on nine of the 10 campusesof the university, and the SJP is extant on six of the 10 campuses. Bothstudent groups are represented across North America, with approximately600 chapters of the MSA/MSU and more than 75 chapters of SJP in univer-sities in the United States and Canada.

Since at least 2001, MSA/MSU and SJP, individually and in collabora-tion, have invited speakers, posted flyers, and staged events whose rhetoricand imagery fit the U.S. Department’s Working Definition of Anti-Semi-tism. These include classical antisemitic tropes of blood libels and accusa-tions of Jews controlling the U.S. government, as well as more currenttropes of equating Jews/Israelis with Nazis and denying the Jewish peoplethe right to self-determination by falsely identifying Israel as a racist, white-

4. Martin Trow, “Californians Redefine Academic Freedom,” Center for Stud-ies in Higher Education, February 2005, http://cshe.berkeley.edu/publications/publications.php?id=60.

5. Leila Beckwith, “The Contribution of Student Groups to Anti-Semitism atthe University of California, Paper presented at the Summer Research Workshop,United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., July 26-August 6,2010; Leila Beckwith and Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, “Are Jewish Students Safeon California Campuses?,” American Thinker, April 25, 2010, http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/04/are_jewish_students_safe_on_ca.html.


supremacist, colonialist nation that should be boycotted and/or destroyed. Infact, a stated aim of the SJP is to mount boycott, divestment, and sanctionscampaigns.

Faculty. Some UC faculty also have contributed to the hostile environ-ment for Jewish students by promoting a virulently anti-Israel ideology onoccasion in their classrooms, in university-sponsored events, and in officialuniversity media. Some also use their university affiliation to promote anacademic and cultural boycott of Israel faculty, students, scientists, artists,and cultural institutions.6 Their anti-Israel activism is not deterred by itsviolation of basic academic precepts, as asserted by the American Associa-tion of University Professors in 2006, almost 300 university presidents in2007, and 38 Nobel laureates, who condemned the boycott as “antitheticalto principles of academic and scientific freedom, and antithetical to princi-ples of freedom of expression and inquiry.”7

An example of the interjection of inflammatory anti-Israel materialinto the classroom was seen when William Robinson, tenured professor ofsociology at UC Santa Barbara, in April 2009 sent an e-mail to his studentswith a set of photos that attempted to equate Nazi atrocities in the Warsawghetto with Israel soldiers’ defense of their citizens in the war with Hamasin Gaza.8 Some students viewed the material as antisemitic, quit the course,and filed a misconduct grievance against Robinson.

The university charges officer summarized the allegations in an e-mailto Robinson: “You, as professor of an academic course, sent to each studentenrolled in that course a highly partisan e-mail accompanied by lurid photo-graphs. The e-mail was unexpected and without educational context. Youoffered no explanation of how the material related to the content of thecourse. You offered no avenue to discuss, nor encouraged any response, tothe opinions and photographs included in the e-mail. You directly told astudent who inquired that the e-mail was not connected to the course. As aresult, two enrolled students were too distraught to continue with thecourse. The constellation of allegations listed above, if substantially true,may violate the Faculty Code of Conduct.”

The faculty committee ruled that no further investigation was neces-sary, and the charges were dismissed.

6. Elizabeth Redden, “Israel Boycott Movement Comes to U.S.,” InsideHigher Ed, January 26, 2009, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/26/boycott.

7. “38 Nobel Winners Slam Academic Boycotts Against Israel,” The Jerusa-lem Post, November 2, 2010, http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=193700.

8. Scott Jaschik, “Crossing a Line,” Inside Higher Ed, April 23, 2009, http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/04/23/ucsb.


In 2009, a faculty member, the head of the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles (UCLA) Center for Near East Studies, exemplified the misuseof university-sponsored events by organizing a conference in which sheinvited four other faculty, longtime demonizers of Israel, to discuss thetopic “Human Rights and Gaza.” As reported by UCLA professor JudeaPearl,9 the speakers attacked the legitimacy of Israel, condemned its birthand survival, and portrayed Hamas as a guiltless, peace-seeking organiza-tion. During the Q&A, the audience chanted “Zionism is Nazism,” and“F—, f— Israel.” The next day, the UCLA Bruin, the student newspaper,published an uncritical article entitled “Scholars Say Attack on Gaza anAbuse of Human Rights.” When Professor Pearl tried to enlist Jewishfaculty into speaking out, “the new Marranos,” as he named them, insistedon keeping their pro-Israel sentiments secret in order to protect themselvesfrom condemnation by other faculty. Thus, the event influenced the atti-tudes of students and faculty.

EFFECT ON STUDENTS

Many Jewish students are affected by the antisemitic manifestations oncampus. In May 2010, more than 700 Jewish UC students10 signed a peti-tion expressing outrage at anti-Jewish rhetoric and imagery on their cam-puses. They asserted that these incidents are as offensive and hurtful toJewish students as a “Compton cookout” or a noose are to African-Ameri-can students. In addition, dozens of Jewish students from three different UCcampuses, who responded to an on-line questionnaire, described feelingharassed and intimidated by the promotion of hatred against the JewishState and of Jews. Almost all of the students felt that the administrators ontheir campuses did not treat Jewish concerns as sensitively as they did theconcerns of other minorities such as African Americans and Latinos.

President Yudof, in a public response,11 criticized the sampling of stu-dent opinion as unreliable.

9. Judea Pearl, “The Rhino Tramples Through,” The Current, www.columbia.edu/cu/current/articles/spring2009/pearl.html.

10. Larry Gordon, “Jewish Organizations Protest UC President’s Handling ofReports of Anti-Semitism,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2010, http://articles.latimes.com/2010/jul/07/local/la-me-0707-uc-jewish-20100707.

11. “Yudof: Letter from 12 Jewish Organizations Concerning Campus Anti-Semitism: ‘Dishearteningly Ill-Informed Rush to Judgment,’ ” Orange CountyIndependent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, July 6, 2010, http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2010/07/06/yudof-letter-from-12-jewish-organizations-concerning-campus-anti-semitism-dishearteningly-ill-informed -rush-to-judgment.


EFFECT ON FACULTY

Faculty also are affected by the “hatred against Jews and Israelis oncampus.” Whereas many faculty self-censor, as pointed out by ProfessorPearl, others speak out. In May 2010, 63 faculty members at UC Irvinepublished a letter12 in which they stated that they “are deeply disturbedabout activities on campus that foment hatred against Jews and Israelis.”They described “the troubling events over the past few years” as including“the painting of swastikas in university buildings, the Star of Daviddepicted as akin to a swastika, a statement (by a speaker repeatedly invitedby the Muslim Student Union) that the Zionist Jew is a party of Satan, astatement by another MSU speaker that the Holocaust was God’s will, thetearing down of posters placed by the student group Anteaters for Israel,and the hacking of their web site.” They reaffirmed that “Some communitymembers, students, and faculty indeed feel intimidated, and at times evenunsafe.”

UC Irvine Chancellor Drake did not respond.

RECOMMENDATIONS TO UNIVERSITY ADMINISTRATION

In June 2010, leaders of 12 Jewish organizations, including theWiesenthal Center, the Orthodox Union, and the United Synagogue of Con-servative Judaism, wrote to UC president Mark Yudof,13 expressing theirconcern about the hostile environment faced by Jewish students on UCcampuses, and calling on him to address this serious problem. They recom-mended that he issue a written statement to the UC community condemningall forms of antisemitism, including language or behavior that demonizedand delegitimized Israel as included in the Working Definition ofAntisemitism of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenopho-bia. They also recommended that a campus policy be established thatincluded a definition of antisemitism and differentiated it from otherbigotries.

12. “UC Faculty Letter Update: Some Community Members, Students, andFaculty Indeed Feel Intimidated, and at Times Even Unsafe,” Orange CountyIndependent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, May 17, 2010, http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/some-community-members-students-and-faculty-indeed-feel-intimidated-and-at-times-even-unsafe/.

13. The letter is published in the Orange County Independent Task Force onAnti-Semitism, June 28, 2010, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/letter-to-president-yudof-6_28_10.pdf.


President Yudof responded14 by ignoring the recommendations andasking Jewish leaders to have patience and faith in the newly establishedAdvisory Councils on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion, which hehad organized in June 2010 in response to a spate of acts of bigotry, includ-ing antisemitism, that had occurred on several UC campuses, with nooses atUC San Diego, a fraternity party that mocked Black History month at UCSan Diego, anti-gay graffiti and swastikas at UC Davis, and the deliberatedisruption, by the Muslim Student Union, of an invited speech by Israelambassador Michael Oren at UC Irvine.

One year later, growing impatient with the university’s efforts, morethan 5,200 members of the California Jewish community, including 1,400UC alumni and current students, more than 2,200 UC parents and familymembers, and more than 230 UC faculty and staff members, signed a letterto President Yudof15 expressing their grave concern for Jewish students. Intheir letter, they stated their opinion that although it had been over a year,the Advisory Councils had recommended no policies and issued no publicstatements informing the UC community about the problem of antisemitismor how it would be addressed. Their letter again recommended incorporat-ing a definition of antisemitism that provided concrete examples, in accor-dance with the EUMC and the U.S. State Department working definitions,of how such a definition would be incorporated into UC policies and prac-tices on antisemitism.

UC ANTISEMITISM ACKNOWLEDGED

President Yudof, in his reply16 to the Jewish community, continued toignore its recommendations. He did, however, publicly acknowledge thepresence of antisemitism on campus, and affirm that it is the responsibilityof the UC administration to combat it. In an official UC Web site posting inOctober 2011, he stated:

I am extremely sympathetic to the concerns of Jewish students. . . . sadlythe cancer of bigotry and antiSemitism runs deep and long throughhuman history. As Berkeley Law Dean Chris Edley, who is acting as a

14. The letter is published in the Orange County Independent Task Force onAnti-Semitism, July 2, 2010, http://octaskforce.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/letter-from-yudof-7_2_10.pdf.

15. “Amcha Initiative’s Letter to UC President Yudof,” Amcha Initiative, Sep-tember 19, 2011, www.amchainitiative.org/letter-to-president-yudof.

16. “President Yudof Addresses Campus Climate Concerns from Jewish Com-munity,” University of California Newsroom, September 21, 2011, http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/26327.


special advisor to me on these issues, told the University’s Board ofRegents, this is not rocket science—it’s more difficult than rocket sci-ence. Such difficulties, of course, do not lessen our obligation to do eve-rything in our power to eradicate this cancer whenever and wherever itflares anew.

Yudof reiterated his personal and official commitment to answeringevery act of violence, hatred, and intimidation by any member of the com-munity, and to ensure that he and the chancellors made certain that all stu-dents, regardless of their faith, encounter an atmosphere that is conducive totheir intellectual and personal growth.

INCOHERENT RESPONSES TO BIGOTRY

Given that the president of UC acknowledges antisemitism on its cam-pus and takes responsibility for combatting it, it would be reasonable toexpect that the university has written, adopted, and communicated coherentpolicies to the campus community, including effective policies of censure.This report, however, examines four steps the administration has taken tocombat bigotry—and finds their measures to be intellectually incoherentand pragmatically ineffective.

Administrators’ Free Speech to Condemn Bigotry

President Yudof, the chancellors of the 10 UC campuses, and the chairand vice chair of the university-wide Academic Senate issued a statement17

on February 26, 2010, in which they condemned “all acts of racism, intoler-ance and incivility. When violations occur it is incumbent on us, as leadersand as stewards of free speech on our campuses, to push back. We have aresponsibility to speak out against activities that promote intolerance orundermine civil dialogue.” This policy statement is consistent with a recom-mendation made on October 26, 2010, by The Office of Civil Rights(OCR),18 that oversees possible discrimination in higher education. TheOCR advocated that university administrations speak out and condemnantisemitism as a remedial step to bigotry on campus. Earlier, the U.S.

17. http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/documents/chancellors_statement_022610.pdf.

18. “Dear Colleague Letter Harassment and Bullying,” U.S. Department ofEducation, Office of Civil Rights, October 26, 2010, http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/dcl-factsheet-201010.pdf.


Commission on Civil Rights,19 examining the problem of campusantisemitism, also specifically recommended that university administrationscondemn antisemitic speech.

Despite the stated policy, UC chancellors and other UC administratorsare very reluctant to name and condemn antisemitic acts. They often ignore,but sometimes sanction, intolerance toward Jews. Since the UC administra-tion refuses to incorporate into policy a working definition of antisemitism,they often do not identify antisemitic discourse and imagery. What theycannot identify, they cannot condemn.

The pattern existed before the policy and continues to be manifestedafter. To mention only one example of many,20 before the policy was stated,the UCIrvine Alumni Association and vice-chancellor of UC Irvine,Manuel Gomez, in April 2006, honored Vanessa Zuabi Zuabi for making“the campus . . . a better place”—despite her being vice president of astudent organization that displayed posters of the Star of David defaced bythe swastika, and had excluded Jewish groups from an “antihate rally.”Gomez spoke at the rally, although he knew that Jewish student groupswere excluded, and thus conferred official endorsement of an event thatdiscriminated against Jews.

Even after the policy was enunciated, the UC administration continuesto condone, sometimes engage in, and often not condemn antisemiticactions on campus. For example, Chancellor Michael Drake at UC Irvinepraised Apartheid Week 2010 as “the hallmark of an educational institutioncommitted to an exchange of ideas,” while he disregarded the statement atthe event made by Malik Ali, one of the invited speakers, that “you Jewsare the new Nazis.”21 A year later, in June 2011, a few weeks after anotherApartheid Week of events demonizing Israel and featuring speakers whoadvocated for boycotts and elimination of the Jewish state, the UC IrvineMuslim Student Union was given an award for “demonstrating a commit-

19. “Findings and Recommendations of the U.S. Commission on Civil RightsRegarding Campus Anti-Semitism,” April 3, 2006, http://www.usccr.gov/pubs/050306FRUSCCRRCAS.pdf.

20. Leila Beckwith, “Anti-Zionism/Anti-Semitism at the University of Califor-nia-Irvine,” in Academics Against Israel and the Jews, ed. Manfred Gerstenfeld(Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, September 2008).

21. Leila Beckwith, “Most Anti-Semitic College,” Minding the Campus, Sep-tember 16, 2010, http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/09/post_70.html.


ment to transforming structures of inequality and injustices through reflec-tion and action” by the UC Irvine Office of the Dean of Students.22

In October 2010, a letter23 to UC Berkeley chancellor Robert J.Birgeneau, sent by the author, Roberta Seid, and Tammi Rossman-Benja-min, protested the sponsorship by a unit of UC Berkeley’s College of Let-ters and Sciences of an event promoting the boycott of Israeli academicsand businesses. The letter pointed out that the action established an officialassociation of the University of California Berkeley with the promotion of aboycott against Israel. The letter asked Chancellor Birgeneau to detach theuniversity’s involvement with the event and publicly condemn the BoycottDivestment and Sanctions campaign as contributing to a hostile environ-ment for Jewish students. Birgeneau was silent.

In stark contrast to his silence about rhetoric offensive to Jewish stu-dents, however, Birgeneau has vigorously condemned speech and behaviorthat he perceives gives offense to other identity groups, specifically, Afri-can Americans and Latinos. In May 2010, in response to the state of Ari-zona’s passage of an immigration bill, Bill SB1070, Birgeneau posted onthe official Web site of UC Berkeley the following statement:24 “I made itwidely known last week to our campus community that I was horrified bythis law. I, along with many others on this campus, and others across thenation, am profoundly disturbed by the passage of this bill, which so manyof us personally believe cannot be implemented without engaging in racialprofiling. The drafting of similar bills by other states is truly frightening.”

More recently, he again used his own free speech to condemn theBerkeley College Republicans25 for holding a bake sale that priced thegoods according to a person’s ethnicity, race, or gender. ChancellorBirgeneau perceived that event as hurtful to African Americans and Latinosand spoke out. Yet, he has been unwilling to condemn speech and behavioroffensive to Jewish students.

22. “UC Irvine ‘Awards’ MSU Legitimacy,” The Investigative Project on Ter-rorism, June 3, 2011, http://www.investigativeproject.org/2939/uc-irvine-awards-msu-lefitimacy.

23. “Serious Concerns about UC Berkeley BDS Event Tuesday October 26,”Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, October 24, 2010, http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2010/10/24/3001/.

24. “Chancellor Birgeneau Denounces Arizona Immigration Bill,” UCBerkeley News Center, May 7, 2010, http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/05/07/immigration/.

25. Javier Panzar, “UC Berkeley Administrators Send Out Campuswide LetterCondemning Bake Sale,” The Daily Californian, September 27, 2011, http://www.dailycal.org/2011/09/26/uc-berkeley-chancellor-sends-campus-wide-letter-condemning-bake-sale/.


Chancellor Birgeneau’s reluctance to intrude in the boycott, divest-ment, and sanctions movement on his campus is mirrored by PresidentYudof. Only after the pain of a bitter student battle at UC Berkeley in 2010and the defeat of the student resolution that called on the university todivest from American companies doing business in Israel did Yudofnotify26 the campus that the Regents had established a policy in 2005 thatwould not allow for divestment from Israel. Although President Yudof, inhis letter to the Jewish community of October 12, 2011, touted his leader-ship in notifying the university community of the Regents policy asresponding “assertively” to anti-Jewish bigotry, the action was peculiarlyhesitant, since it occurred only after students had experienced intense har-assment from fellow students and from organizations and persons outside ofthe university community.

President Yudolf’s Advisory Council

In June 2010, President Yudof established the President’s AdvisoryCouncil on Campus Climate, Culture and Inclusion, in response to multipleacts of bigotry that targeted African Americans, Jews, and gays on severalof the UC campuses. The choice of members of the council was directlyguided by assumptions that underlie principles of diversity; people werechosen by their racial and ethnic identity, and because they were activeadvocates for their identity groups.

President Yudof then established working groups within the council.Some of those groups were directed specifically to address concerns ofAfrican-American, Latino, and gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered students.Jewish students and antisemitic hostility was not set as a specific focus ofany working group. A review of more than 600 pages of documentsreceived under a public records request about the proceedings of the Advi-sory Council during the 2010-2011 academic year revealed that there wasvirtually no discussion of anti-Jewish bigotry.

After a proposed letter signed by many thousands from the CaliforniaJewish community came to President Yudof’s attention, he instructed twomembers of the UC Advisory Council “to speak with Jewish students in aneffort to better understand both their challenges and positive experiences onour campuses.” The representatives visited UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UCSanta Cruz, where they spoke to small groups of selected students for littlemore than an hour on each campus. UC Santa Cruz students who attended

26. “UC Regents Statement on Divestment,” Orange County Independent TaskForce on Anti-Semitism, May 10, 2010, http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2010/05/10/uc-regents-statement-on-divestment/.


the meeting reported that they were given insufficient time to speak abouttheir concerns. Several students also stated that one of the two representa-tives was surprisingly ill informed about campus anti-Jewish harassmentand instead tried to emphasize to the students how privileged Jewish stu-dents were.

For Jewish students, the council’s success will depend specifically onits commitment to address antisemitism and its ability to identify discourse,imagery, and actions that are unacceptable expressions of antisemitic big-otry. The evidence is not reassuring.

Diversity Initiatives

In March 2010, at the special Regents meeting called specifically toaddress the acts of bigotry that had occurred on several of the UC campusesin the previous month, the UC Regents’ response27 was to pledge toincrease diversity throughout the UC system, to raise more scholarshipdonations for underrepresented minorities, and to expand the use of holisticadmission criteria.

Increasing diversity at UC was already a well-funded activity. HeatherMac Donald, in July 2011 in an article published in Minding the Campus,28

documents the enormous enterprise to promote diversity, comprising manypeople and entities within the university. As an example, she mentions onecampus, UC San Diego, that closed substantive academic studies because ofsevere budget cuts, but added a new full-time position of “vice-chancellorfor equity, diversity, and inclusion.” The position increased the enormousdiversity enterprise that already existed, including: the Chancellor’s Diver-sity Office, the associate vice chancellor for faculty equity, the assistantvice chancellor for diversity, the faculty equity advisors, the graduate diver-sity coordinators, the staff diversity liaison, the undergraduate studentdiversity liaison, the graduate student diversity liaison, the chief diversityofficer, the director of development for diversity initiatives, the Office ofAcademic Diversity and Equal Opportunity, and the Diversity Council.

27. “Regents Pledge Diversity Action,” UC Newsroom, March 24, 2010, http://universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/23079.

28. Heather Mac Donald, “Less Academics, More Narcissism,” Minding theCampus, July 18, 2011, http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2011/07/less_academics_more_narcissism.html.


Diversity is a social ideal29 that has been embraced by universityadministrations, including UC. UC, in a Regents Policy,30 defines diversityas “the variety of personal experiences, values, and worldviews thatarise from differences of culture and circumstance. Such differences includerace, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, language, abilities/disabilities, sexualorientation, gender identity, socioeconomic status, and geographic region,and more.” The policy explicitly commits the university to removebarriers to “recruitment, retention, and advancement of students, faculty,and staff “from historically excluded populations who are currentlyunderrepresented.”

Thus, diversity is acclaimed as compensation for past grievances.Equally important, it is touted as a way to combat bigotry, based on theassumption that when members of groups of diverse backgrounds arebrought together, their attitudes will be transformed into tolerance andrespect. Given human history, such an assumption is doubtful, and despitethe high moral standards ascribed to diversity, it has come down to racial,ethnic, and sexual orientation interest groups vying for the university’sresources.

Diversity efforts do not combat antisemitism; its ideology and the wayin which it is practiced ignores Jews. To the degree that diversity acts toinclude more members of “underrepresented minorities” on the UC campus,it ignores Jews. To the degree that diversity acts to provide more resourcesto members of “underrepresented minorities,” it ignores Jews. To thedegree that diversity promotes more special programs for or about “under-represented minorities,” it ignores Jews. To the degree that diversityencompasses the belief that proximity and/or social intercourse is a magicalsolution to bigotry of others, it ignores history and fails Jews.

Olive Tree Initiative

In 2007, a group of students of different ethnic and religious identitiesat UC Irvine formed the Olive Tree Initiative (OTI). Its stated goal was “topromote dialogue and discussion regarding the Israeli-Arab conflict.” Theprogram became an integral part of the UC Irvine Center for CitizenPeacebuilding, with a salaried director and faculty from the School ofSocial Sciences. There have been four trips to Israel and the West Bank, as

29. Peter Wood, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept (San Francisco: Encoun-ter Books, 2003).

30. “Regents’ Policy 4400: University of California Diversity Statement,September 15, 2010, http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/coordrev/policy/PP063006DiversityStatement.pdf.


well as more than seventy events on and off campus. There are now chap-ters at UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, and UCLA.31

President Yudof, in his letter of October 2011 to the Jewish commu-nity, identified the OTI as being in “the best tradition of activism, publicservice and open discussion,” and affirmed that he was “a strong supporter”of the program. In fact, in May 2010, President Yudof did publicly congrat-ulate the OTI and two of its student leaders with a first-ever President’sAward for Outstanding Leadership. UC Irvine Chancellor Drake has alsohonored the OTI by giving its founders an award for “Living Our Values.”At the Regents meeting on March 24, 2010, held specifically to address arash of incidents of bigotry, including the disruption at UC Irvine by theMSU of the lecture by the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Chancel-lor Drake also acclaimed the OTI as proof that students at UC Irvine “liveand practice tolerance.” Thus, the UC administration touts the OTI as oneof their deliberate steps to combat anti-Jewish bigotry.

Yet, the program itself involves individuals and groups who have tiesto terrorist groups, who advocate for the destruction of Israel and its citi-zens, and who promote boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israelisand American companies doing business with Israel. While the programtries for a superficial balance of Palestinian and Israeli speakers, since theoverwhelming majority of the Palestinians have expressed virulent enmityto Israel and its people, the program succeeds in giving “equal time” tothose who advocate for the destruction of Israel and its citizens, and Jewswho advocate for maintaining their own nation and lives.

A revealing incident about the Orwellian designation of the OTI as away to combat anti-Jewish bigotry was the inadvertent disclosure, revealedby a Public Information request made by a member of the Jewish commu-nity, that the UC Irvine faculty and staff of the OTI arranged for OTI stu-dents in the fall of 2009 to meet with Hamas leader Aziz Duwaik. Hamas isopenly antisemitic; it is designated as a terrorist organization by the U.S.State Department; its charter calls for the destruction of Israel and the mur-der of Jews. Compounding the recklessness of the program, the organizerstold the students to keep the meeting secret from Israeli officials and from“anyone who would have disagreed with this meeting.”

31. See Leila Beckwith, “The Olive Tree Initiative: A Fig Leaf for Anti-Semi-tism?,” American Thinker, January 2, 2011, http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/01/the_olive_tree_initiative_a_fi.html; Leila Beckwith, “The University ofCalifornia’s Antisemitism Problem Deepens”, American Thinker, April 5, 2011,http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/04/the_university_of_californias.html;Frank Crimi, “The Olive Tree Initiative and Terror,” Front Page Mag, October 6,2011, http://frontpagemag.com/2011/10/06/the-olive-tree-initiative-and-terror-1-1/2/.


Equally egregious, UC Irvine Chancellor Drake, who was notified inOctober 2009 about the meeting, did not inform the public, did not censurethe organizers, but six months later touted it as the way in which he wascombating antisemitism on his campus.

President Yudof dismisses the significance of the event. But ratherthan designating it as an isolated incident to be forgotten, it can be per-ceived as a glaring expression of the moral confusion of the program.

The University of California administration does not propose a similarsolution to bigotry against any other group. When it acts to combat racism,it does not give a platform to racists to state their antipathy to AfricanAmericans. It does not give a platform to those who consider homosexual-ity a moral sin when it acts to combat bigotry against gays/lesbians/bisexu-als/transgendered. Unexplained is the singular and distorted response tobigotry against Jews.

LEGAL REMEDIES TO COMBAT ANTISEMITISM

Given the ineffectiveness of the university administration in combatinganti-Jewish bigotry, legal remedies have been sought by individuals. Theireffect is not yet apparent, since the federal actions are still ongoing. But onecourt case in the state of California has weighed in and has determined thatan action that resulted from the extreme animus of the Muslim StudentUnion to Israel was unlawful.

Federal suit against UC by Jessica Felber and Brian Maissy. JessicaFelber and Brian Maissy have brought the first federal lawsuit against theUniversity of California, in which they allege that the administrationallowed a hostile environment to exist that led directly to Felber’s beingphysically assaulted.32 On March 5, 2010, Felber, then a student at UCBerkeley, was attacked and injured on campus during a pro-Israel eventwhile she was holding a sign stating “Israel wants Peace.” Her assailant,Husam Zakharia, also a UC Berkeley student, was the leader of Students forJustice in Palestine at Berkeley. The attack was not the first she or otherJews had experienced on campus from students who were members of SJPand similar student groups. The suit alleges that the UC administration hadbeen made fully aware of the hostile environment, and failed to take ade-quate measures to quell it; instead, it has condoned, allowed, and enabledstudent groups to threaten, harass and intimidate Jewish students.

32. Jamie Glazov, “Berkeley on Trial over Jewish Student’s Assault,” FrontPage Mag, March 8, 2011, http://frontpagemag.com/2011/03/08/berkeley-on-trial-over-jewish-students-assault/


The case was dismissed by U.S. District Judge Seeborg on December22, 2011.33 The judge ruled that much of the alleged harassment constitutedprotected political speech, and that the plantiffs had failed to show “deliber-ate indifference” of the university administration to the conduct notamounting to protected speech. Nevertheless, the court granted Felber leaveto file an amended complaint, which means that she will have anotheropportunity to make her case.

Title VI complaint against UC Santa Cruz for allowing faculty toengender a hostile environment for Jewish students. In June 2009, TammiRossman-Benjamin, lecturer in Hebrew and Jewish Studies at UC SantaCruz, sought legal remediation for a hostile environment for Jewish stu-dents at UC Santa Cruz by filing a Title VI Complaint with the Office forCivil Rights (OCR) of the U.S. Department of Education.34 At that time,and until October 2010, Jewish students were excluded from the protectionof the civil rights law because Jews were viewed as exclusively a religiousgroup not covered by the statute that protected ethnic and racial groupsfrom discrimination, intimidation, and harassment institutionally toleratedby a school that received federal funds. In October 2010, the OCR reinter-preted the law to cover “any discrete religious group that shares, or is per-ceived to share, ancestry or ethnic characteristics (e.g., Muslims or Sikhs),”including Jewish students.

On March 7, 2011, the OCR determined that the issue was appropriatefor investigation under the new guidelines, and identified the followingissue for investigation: The recipient (UC Santa Cruz) “failed to take stepsin a manner consistent with the requirements of the Title VI of the CivilRights Act of 1964 to respond to notice of a then existing hostile environ-ment for Jewish Students based on their actual or perceived ancestry orethnic characteristics.”

Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint alleges, among other things, that anti-Israel discourse and behavior in classrooms and that departmentally anduniversity-sponsored events had created an “emotionally and intellectuallyhostile environment for Jewish students and had adversely affected theireducational experience” at UC Santa Cruz. The complaint further allegesthat: rhetoric heard in Santa Cruz classrooms and at numerous events spon-

33. Felber v. Yudof, N.D.CA., case no. C 11-1012 RS (December 22, 2011)(slip op.) (order granting motions to dismiss).

34. “Office for Civil Rights of the U.S. Department of Education (OCR) OpensTitle VI, Civil Rights Act of 1964 Investigation at the University of CaliforniaSanta Cruz,” Orange County Independent Task Force on Anti-Semitism, March13, 2011, http://octaskforce.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/office-of-civil-rights-of-the-u-s-department-of-education-ocr-to-open-a-title-vi-civil-rights-act-of-1964-investigation-at-the-university-of-california-santa-cruz/.


sored and funded by academic and administrative units on campus wentbeyond legitimate criticism of Israel and crossed the line into antisemitismaccording to the standards employed by the U.S. Department of State; andthat there were students who felt emotionally and intellectually harassedand intimidated to the point that they were reluctant or afraid to express aview that was not anti-Israel; and that some students stayed away fromcourses because they knew that the courses would be biased against Israeland intolerant of another legitimate point of view.

Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint also chronicled the failure of numer-ous efforts that she and others had made from 2001 to encourage UC SantaCruz faculty and administrators to acknowledge and address the problem.

The acceptance by the OCR of Rossman-Benjamin’s complaint is alandmark step in extending the same federal protection to Jewish studentsthat exists for other students for their racial, ethnic, and sexual orientationmembership. A previous Title VI complaint, filed by the Zionist Organiza-tion of America (ZOA) in 2004 on behalf of Jewish students at UC Irvine,was dismissed under the interpretation by the OCR that the law did notprotect Jews. The investigation, however, is still open by the OCR for anew Title VI complaint against UC Irvine, filed by the ZOA.

Legal action against Muslim Student Union members for disruptingAmbassador Oren’s speech at UC Irvine. Student members of the MSA/MSU and SJP over the years, on several occasions at several campuses, haddeliberately attempted to silence lecturers with whom they disagreed. Theydid so February 10, 2004, at UC Berkeley, attempting to stifle Dr. DanielPipes, by standing up and calling out “racist” and “Zionist.” They did soagain, October 22, 2007, at UC Berkeley, repeatedly interrupting NonieDarwish, shouting out “Facist” and “Racist.” There were no consequencesto the student disrupters.

At UC Irvine, February 8, 2010, Michael Oren, Israeli ambassador tothe United States, was invited to speak at UC Irvine by the School of Law,Department of Political Science, Center for the Study of Democracy, sevenstudent groups, and community co-sponsors. The MSU, in an organizedcampaign, planned beforehand, as revealed by e-mails and minutes of ameeting anonymously sent to the university administration, deliberately dis-rupted the lecture, calling out “Killer” and “How many Palestinians didyou kill?” Eleven students, eight from UC Irvine and three from UC River-side, were arrested and cited for disturbing a public event. UC Irvine foundthe MSU guilty of dishonesty, obstructing disciplinary procedures, disor-derly conduct, and participation in a disturbance of the peace of unlawfulassembly, and suspended the MSU for Fall Quarter 2010.

The district attorney of Orange County brought charges against thestudents. During the trial, conflicting views of who was being censored


were argued by the prosecutor and defense attorneys. Although the MSUattempted to turn their action of suppressing others’ free speech into anexpression of their First Amendment rights, the jury convicted 10 of themof two misdemeanors of conspiring to and disrupting a public event.35

CONCLUSIONS

The university administration can be perceived as being quicker tocondemn acts of bigotry that may be hurtful to some groups, but less likelyto condemn rhetoric, imagery, and acts that may hurt Jews. Since they avoidadopting a working definition of antisemitism, they avoid recognizing manymanifestations of antisemitism, particularly those that demonize Israel orsupporters of Israel. They also, then, do not grapple with differentiatinglegitimate criticism of policies from demonization of Jews. Therefore, evenclearly antisemitic statements such as “You Jews are the new Nazis,” whenthey are embedded in a screed about Israel, is overlooked by theadministration.

The university administration’s muddle arises from their refusal toacknowledge the specificity of antisemitic bigotry; that in contrast to othergroups against whom bigotry might exist, anti-Jewish bigotry does notoperate now to restrict the presence of Jews on campus. Jews also, in con-trast to other ethnic groups, are not demanding a different allocation of uni-versity resources. But harassment and intimidation of Jews on campus doesneed to be confronted. The university administration cannot do so as long asit refuses to acknowledge that demonization and delegitimization of theJewish state are manifestations of antisemitism.

Proposing diversity as a solution to antisemitism is either wishfulthinking or deliberate obfuscation. A basic tenet of diversity is promotingequal access to membership in and resources of the university. It does notaddress what the manifestations of antisemitism are, who on the universitycampus engages in antisemitic behavior, or how to confront it. If diversityis a solution, it is to a different set of problems. Using a diversity model willnot have the effect of reducing bigotry against Jews.

The only way to combat antisemitism is to identify and condemn itwhen it occurs in rhetoric, imagery, and actions; to identify its agents andcondemn them; to grapple with the hard distinctions between free speechand allowing and fostering a hostile environment for Jewish students; and toinstitute policies based on those realities.

35. Lauren Williams, Nicole Santa Cruz, and Mike Anton, “Students Guilty ofDisrupting Speech in ‘Irvine 11’ Case,” Los Angeles Times, September 24, 2011,http://articles.latimes.com/2011/sep/24/local/la-me-irvine-eleven-20110924.


*Leila Beckwith is professor emeritus of pediatrics at UCLA, and a Board memberof Scholars for Peace in the Middle East, the California Association of Scholars,and the Amcha Initiative. For the past several years, she has used her scholarship tobattle anti-Israeli rhetoric on university campuses and to protect Jewish studentsfrom harassment and intimidation.

On Whiteness and the Jews

Linda Maizels*

In the 1990s, the American academy witnessed attempts by both individ-uals and groups to promote and legitimize inaccurate or false historicalnarratives, specifically Holocaust denial and the allegation that Jews weredisproportionately responsible for the African slave trade. This articleoffers the hypothesis that the label of Jewish “whiteness” has been usedas a rationalization to deny Jews a voice in the discourse of identity oncontemporary campuses and also to portray antisemitic rhetoric as pro-tected political speech.

Key Words: Identity Politics, Jews, Multiculturalism, “New Antisemitism,”“Whiteness”

On two different occasions during the 1990s, the governing council ofthe American Historical Association (AHA) was compelled, however reluc-tantly, to take a stand against individuals and groups who promoted andtried to legitimize inaccurate or false historical narratives. The first issuethat occupied the council was Holocaust denial. Those who denied the Hol-ocaust styled themselves as revisionists, asserting that the attempted geno-cide of European Jewry was nothing but a hoax and that Jews ultimatelybenefitted from this false story because it allowed them to capitalize ontheir role as victims to reap material gain, garner support for the state ofIsrael, and position themselves as an oppressed minority group.1 The sec-ond issue that drew the attention of the council was the allegation that Jewswere largely responsible for the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Those whopromulgated this view accused Jews of minimizing or denying their ownculpability in this historical injustice and, at the same time, privileging theirown history as victims, which had the effect of obscuring the pernicious

1. For rebuttals to the basic tenets of Holocaust denial, see Deborah Lipstadt,Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York:The Free Press, 1993); Kenneth S. Stern, Holocaust Denial (New York: The Amer-ican Jewish Committee, 1993); Michael Shermer and Alex Grobman, Denying His-tory: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say It?(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Pierre Vidal Naquet, Assassins ofMemory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1992); Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Nega-tion: Reflections on the Question of Genocide, trans. Mary Byrd Kelly (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

463


effects of the actual role played by Jews (and Israelis) as oppressors of otherminority groups or peoples.2 Although these issues were addressed by theAHA in this order, it does not mean that they did not overlap; instead, theyeach experienced peaks of importance at specific times during the decade.3

As we shall see, in both instances the common approach appeared tobe to falsify or distort the larger discourse about an historical event or seriesof events by accusing Jews as a collective of having falsified or distortedthe historical record and then using their influence to cover up their actions.Similarly, in both cases there appeared to be resentment at the concept ofJews as victims and corresponding assertions about the power that Jewswield both as privileged individuals and as a collective. The Jews were ableto maintain such elaborate artifices about historical events, according totheir accusers, because of the disproportionate influence they enjoy in gov-ernment, the media, the academy, the world of finance and banking, and thelike.

Certainly, this canard about undue Jewish power and influence is noth-ing new. One relic of late 19th- and early 29th-century antisemitism, TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion, continues to be of interest in various partsof the world, and the attacks of September 11, 2001, have provided evenmore fodder for anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists of all types. It is interest-ing to note, however, that, in the 1990s, Jewish machinations were seen notas attempts to manipulate economies or governments but as efforts to eraselarger truths by rewriting history. And these accusations about Jewsprompted the AHA to do what it had hardly ever done before—to affirm theexistence of certain historical verities.4

2. For answers to these charges, see Saul S. Friedman, Jews and the AmericanSlave Trade (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1998); Eli Faber, Jews,Slaves and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (New York: New YorkUniversity Press, 2000); Harold Brackman, Ministry of Lies: The Truth Behind theNation of Islam’s “The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews” (New York:Four Walls Eight Windows Press, 1994).

3. The book used most often to substantiate charges against the Jews concern-ing their involvement in the African slave trade was The Secret RelationshipBetween Blacks and Jews, Volume One, published in 1991, at the same time thatinterest in Holocaust denial was reaching a peak. And Bradley Smith’s Committeefor the Open Debate of the Holocaust (CODOH) was still sending advertisementsespousing Holocaust denial to college newspapers in 1999 (Shermer and Grobman,64).

4. Toby Axelrod, “Combating a Monumental Lie,” Jewish Week, February 16,1995. Axelrod reported that the AHA’s statements about Jewish involvement inAfrican-American slavery and on Holocaust denial were the only public announce-ments on a historical topic that had been released by the organization “within recent

2011] ON WHITENESS AND THE JEWS 465

Because of this emphasis on the historical record, it might be said thatthe effects of these efforts to discredit Jews were felt most keenly within theinsular community of American academia. This leads me to the first ques-tion I ask in the course of this essay: What made the political culture of theAmerican academy in the 1990s susceptible to attempts to manipulate andfalsify historical narrative? The second question that concerns me is this:Why was it that Jews and Jewish issues appeared to be at the center of someof the most serious of these attempts? It is my contention that the mostinfluential factor in regard to the falsification of the Jewish role in history atthat time was the question of Jewish “whiteness,” and that this factorbecame especially salient in the cultural climate of American academia inthe 1990s.

When confronted in the early 1990s with repeated efforts to positionHolocaust denial as a legitimate attempt at revisionist history, the governingcouncil of the American Historical Association was at first reluctant to act.The council decided in the fall of 1991 not to issue a statement that wouldreaffirm the truth of the Holocaust, in part because some in the associationfelt strongly that the AHA, in words of its president, William E.Leuchtenberg, “ought not to get into the business of certifying what is andis not history.” Instead, the council issued a statement that called on histori-ans to “initiate plans now to encourage study of the significance of theHolocaust.” Later that year, though, the council did take action on the clos-ing day of the association’s annual meeting, when some historians at theconference pressed for a more forceful response. In December 1991, thegoverning council of the AHA unanimously adopted a statement condemn-ing “attempts to deny the fact of the Holocaust” and underlined that “noserious historian questions that the Holocaust took place.”5

It is simple enough to diagnose the underlying motives of Holocaustdenial as “antisemitic” and be done with the matter. Although there arethose in the denial movement who eschew overt Jew-hatred as injurious totheir overall cause, that the deniers harbor ill-will toward Jews and the stateof Israel will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with their tactics andoverall agenda. One of the reasons that deniers harbor antipathy towardJews that is germane to my central assertion is that the many of those withinthe denial coterie see Jews as racially different from others of European

memory.” See also Karen J. Winkler, “Group Issues Statement on Role of Jews inSlave Trade,” Chronicle of Higher Education, February 17, 1995.

5. Lipstadt, 205. See also Karen J. Winkler, “How Should Scholars Respond toAssertions That the Holocaust Never Happened?” Chronicle of Higher Education,December 11, 1991, and Ellen K. Coughlin, “Denials of Holocaust Are Con-demned,” Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 1992.


descent, an attitude that hearkens back to 19th-century racially basedantisemitism. The non-whiteness of Jews fits neatly with the allegation thatthe “hoax” of the Holocaust was disseminated to defame white Europeansand burden them with guilt, and it also feeds into conspiracy theories thatpurport to explain world events and the “dispossession” of whites from theirrightful place in the racial hierarchy.6 While there are some within the whitenationalist world who have accepted Jews as white, this attitude appears tobe a minority viewpoint, and there are those who have conjectured that thismight be a ploy or a tactic to attract people to the cause of white national-ism who might otherwise be averse to raw anti-Jewish hostility.7

This conception of Jews as non-white, however, does little to explainthe attitude that deniers found for the dissemination of their ideas, espe-cially within the extracurricular side of American campus culture. Cer-tainly, by the 1990s, racially based hatred toward Jews had been largelydiscredited in the United States outside of certain fringe groups, and quotasthat used to separate Jews from other whites in the interest of collegeadmissions were largely abolished by the 1960s.8 The number of minoritystudents, including people of color, that attended American universities hadalso expanded exponentially since the end of World War II as the Americanacademy purposefully broadened its educational mission to include talentedstudents from all walks of life.9 Yet, Holocaust denial still found expressionon American campuses at the end of the twentieth century.

6. Leonard Zeskind described the attitude toward Jews within the white nation-alist movement and concludes that, with certain exceptions, most of those withinthe denial movement classify Jews as non-white. Leonard Zeskind, Blood andPolitics: The History of the White Nationalist Movement from the Margins to theMainstream (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2009), chap. 37 (especially pp. 373-380). See also Evelyn Rich, “Ku Klux Klan Ideology, 1954-1988,” dissertation,U.M.I. Dissertation Service, 1989.

7. Zeskind, 373-80.8. For Jewish “whiteness” and the assimilation of Jews as “white ethnics,” see

Karen Brodkin, How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race inAmerica (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Eric L. Goldstein, ThePrice of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2006); Matthew Frye Jacobson, Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival inPost-Civil Rights America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Ondiscrimination at American universities in the prewar period, see Jerome Karabel,The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale andPrinceton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005), and Harold S. Wechsler,The Qualified Student: A History of Selective College Admissions in America (NewYork: J. Wiley, 1977).

9. John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore, MD:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), chap. 7.


One reason for this somewhat ironic state of affairs was that the deni-ers were successful at repositioning their arguments so that, to the untrainedeye, they appeared to be making a political argument rather than one thathinged upon antisemitism of a racial or conspiratorial nature. As has beenwell documented, perhaps the most familiar instances of Holocaust denialon campus concerned the efforts of Bradley Smith and the Committee onOpen Debate on the Holocaust (CODOH) to place advertisements withtitles such as “The Holocaust Controversy: The Case for Open Debate” or“The Holocaust Story: How Much Is False? The Case for Open Debate” incampus newspapers. While many of the periodicals that Smith approachedrefused to run the advertisement, others, influenced by the positioning ofHolocaust denial as a challenge to the excesses of political correctness onAmerican campuses, argued that the publication of these ads was an issueof freedom of speech.10

In the mid-1990s, just a few years after the ideological debates overHolocaust denial on campus reached a peak, the subject of disproportionateJewish involvement in the trans-Atlantic slave trade became a recurringissue on American campuses. At that time, the AHA governing council tookmore decisive action than it had previously when dealing with Holocaustdenial and passed a policy resolution on February 8, 1995, that “con-demn[ed] as false any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportion-ate role in the exploitation of slave labor or in the Atlantic slave trade.” Thecouncil also cited the Davis-Drescher statement, submitted to the council byhistorians David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher, both noted experts onthe history of slavery and antislavery movements, which described “a num-ber of egregious assaults on the historical record in institutions of higherlearning and at educational conferences” over the past few years, the state-ment confirmed that these types of allegations about Jews “so misrepresentthe historical record . . . that we believe them only to be part of a longantisemitic tradition that presents Jews as negative central actors in humanhistory.” When asked why the AHA had created the resolution in connec-tion with allegations about the slave trade, AHA president John Coatsworthexplained that the organization acted “because of the particularly perniciouscharacter of this falsehood” that “seemed directed toward defaming a partic-ular ethnic or religious group. He added that, “While the association does

10. For rebuttals of the freedom of speech argument, see Lipstadt, chap. 10;Stern, 10-14 and Appendix A; Shermer and Grobman, 13, 62-63.


not have a policy of correcting every false statement about history that itsmembers encounter, in this case we were compelled to act.”11

If we view the events that precipitated the council’s policy resolutionthrough the lens of Jewish “whiteness,” we must turn to The Secret Rela-tionship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, a polemic published by theNation of Islam that remains one of the most popular sources for allegationsabout Jews and the slave trade. In the introduction to the book, the Jews aredepicted not only as white people but also as a representative symbol ofsome of the worst qualities of white people:

Jews have been conclusively linked to the greatest criminal endeavorever undertaken against an entire race of people—a crime against human-ity—the Black [sic] African Holocaust . . . Deep within the recesses ofthe Jewish historical record is the irrefutable evidence that the mostprominent of the Jewish pilgrim fathers used kidnapped Black [sic] Afri-cans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group inNew World history . . . The immense wealth of Jews, as with most of theWhite [sic] colonial fathers, was acquired by the brutal subjugation ofBlack Africans purely on the basis of skin color [my italic emphasisadded].12

A number of scholars and Jewish professionals addressed the issuesthat resulted when professors, including Tony Martin of Wellesley Collegeand Leonard Jeffries of City College of New York, employed this book inthe classroom, and others took on the issue of incendiary black speakersmaking appearances on American campuses.13 To further illuminate theissue of Jewish “whiteness,” though, I will examine a lesser known incidentthat occurred at Ohio’s Kent State University. The events that took place at

11. American Historical Association, “”Statement about Jews and the SlaveTrade.” Press release, February 8, 1995. See also Axelrod, 1995, and Winkler,1995.

12. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, preparedby The Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam (Chicago: Nation ofIslam, 1991).

13. For information on this type of anti-Jewish rhetoric on American campuses,see Spencer Blakeslee, The Death of American Antisemitism (Westport CT: Prager,2000); Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars,” The NewYork Times, July 20, 1992; Cornel West, “Black Anti-Semitism and the Rhetoric ofResentment,” Tikkun, Vol. 7, No. 1, January/February 1992; Dennis Ross, Schooledin Hate: Anti-Semitism on Campus (New York: Anti-Defamation League, 1997);Jeffrey A. Ross and Melanie L. Schneider, “Antisemitism on the Campus: Chal-lenge and Response,” in Antisemitism in America: Outspoken Experts Explode theMyths, ed. Jerome Chanes (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1995).


KSU will serve as an example, albeit an extreme one, of the ties that existbetween Jewish “whiteness” and the refashioning of historical narrative.14

In this particular case, an article appeared in a KSU journal calledUhuru (Swahili for “freedom”) that was specifically devoted to black stu-dent interests and concerns and was published by the Black United Students(BUS). The article that spawned such controversy and argument, “The Par-adox of European Jewry,” was published in the spring 1994 issue of Uhuru.It was written by Terry Shropshire, at the time a sophomore at the Univer-sity of Akron. The article began with the acknowledgement that the Holo-caust was “one of the most horrific crimes ever committed againstmankind,” and included the author’s assertion that his empathy for the hor-rors that had befallen Europe’s Jews stemmed from his “African descent.”Nothing in the first two paragraphs of the article can be construed as eitheranti-Jewish or antisemitic.

There were, however, two elements that provided semantic clues onwhat would follow. First, the word “Jews,” mentioned twice in the firstparagraph, was always qualified by a reminder of Jewish whiteness; hence,“By 1945, over one-third of all of the world’s Caucasian Jews had beenstuffed into ovens—as the world watched. In all, approximately eleven mil-lion Caucasian Jews, Gypsies, and other ‘undesirables’ had been elimi-nated” [my italic emphasis added]. Second, the word “Holocaust” wasqualified by the word “Jewish”; hence: “The Jewish Holocaust was a crimethat can never be forgotten and we must all ensure that something like thisis never repeated.” This detail indicated that, for the author, there had beenmore than one holocaust in human history. Although such a contention isnot in itself an offensive or unusual opinion, it did reflect one of the mainassertions of the article—namely, that blacks had suffered more because oftheir enslavement than had Jews because of the Holocaust.15

The rest of the article was less ambiguous in its intent. The secondsection, subtitled “Victims Only?” listed the many times in history that“Caucasian Jews” had portrayed themselves as victims, but then questionedwhether Jews could legitimately claim to have been victimized in eachinstance. In particular, the article cast doubt on the veracity of the existenceof Arab and black antisemitism, and then proceeded to assert that “Jewshave exercised (what some call) an inordinate or disproportionate role in thedecimation, defilement, cultural colonization, enslavement and genocide of

14. The documents pertaining to events at Kent State University were collectedby Lewis Fried, who was a professor of English at KSU, and are housed at theAmerican Jewish Archives in Cincinnati.

15. Terry Shropshire, “The Paradox of European Jewry,” Uhuru, Vol. 6, No. 4(Spring 1994): 34.


many of the world’s people up until today.” The article also questioned howJews had “the audacity . . . to perpetually illuminate or highlight their ownvictimization while conveniently ‘forgetting’ their role in the destruction,murder and dehumanization of millions of others.”16

The next section, subtitled “The So-Called Chosen People,” employeda multiplicity of information and quotes taken from a number of sources tosupport and, ostensibly, to prove the author’s contention that Jews weredisproportionately involved in the African slave trade. A significant numberof these sources were described as direct quotes from the work of Jewishscholars, a point that Shropshire was careful to make when he referred tothem.17

The article also emphasized that present-day Jews were unrelated tothe original Israelites of the Bible because they were descendants of “Rus-sian-steppe tribesmen” found in “the dark caves of the Caucasus moun-tains,” and concluded that the claims of “Caucasian Jews” after World WarII “for a land in ancient Palestine, in the Middle East, looks absolutelyabsurd, ludicrous, grotesque.” In addition, Shropshire inserted references toAfrocentric scholars who asserted that the authentic heirs to Biblical Jewishtradition were black and not white.18

The following section, “Spanish Inquisition and After,” explained thatJewish money financed the first voyage of Christopher Columbus and that,in later years, many of the conquistadors were Jewish and took a dispropor-tionate role in the decimation of the native peoples of the Americas. Withthe continent now largely depopulated of a native workforce, “CaucasianJews” then became some of the leading slave traffickers in the Americas. Inshort, says Shropshire, “Jews were major participants in the slaughter of theNative Americans, and were major participants in the greatest human trag-edy history knows (no, not Hitler’s Holocaust), the Trans-Atlantic SlaveTrade.”19

16. Ibid., 34-35.17. Many of the quotes in the article attributed to Jewish scholars were taken

from The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume One, prepared byThe Historical Research Department of the Nation of Islam (Chicago: Nation ofIslam, 1991).

18. For a critical analysis of anti-Jewish thought in Afrocentric theory, see AmyNewman, “The Idea of Judaism in Feminism and Afrocentrism,” in Insider/Out-sider: American Jews and Multiculturalism, eds. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky,and Susannah Heschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See alsoStephen Howe, Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (London: VersoBooks, 1998).

19. Shropshire, 36.


The rest of the article drove home the point that while Christian whiteswere also involved in “the Holocausts of Native Americans and Africans,”Jews were disproportionately involved: “Caucasian Jews outnumbered theirCaucasian Christian brethren in the number of slaves owned by almost twoto one . . . THESE ARE FACTS SUPPORTED BY THEIR OWN SCHOL-ARS, HISTORIANS, AND RABBIS” [emphasis in the original]. In addi-tion, the whiteness of Jews was used to suggest their unqualified support forthe Confederacy, their instrumentality in instituting Jim Crow laws, and the“unholy, ungodly alliance” that existed “between the political state of Israel(occupied Palestine) and the barbaric, blatantly racist regime of white SouthAfrica.” Jews were subsequently characterized as “perniciously and atro-ciously anti-Black, anti-Arab, [and] anti-Native American.”20

The article accused Jews of bad faith in their participation in move-ments for social justice and civil rights because of their clannishness andethnocentrism. “Do the Caucasian Jews only take care of themselves andcontinue to discard, and defile, and trash, and defecate on the rest of theworld?” Shropshire asked. “Don’t be fooled by the facades and affectations,for they have not behaved like friends or benevolent allies to African, Arabor Native American people. These are the works of those who should bedescribed as enemies of our people, our struggle, our children, and ourfuture.”21

Shropshire concluded that the relationship between Jews and otherminority groups was “built upon injustice, lying, thievery, murder, hypoc-risy, duplicity, deceit and the distortion of historical facts.” Jews used “thename of God to facilitate [their] racist, narrow-minded mentality and gutterpractices of religious doctrine . . . [and] to facilitate murder, oppression,imperialism, international warfare, the taking of someone else’s land, or theacquisition of power and wealth.” He also emphasized that he had writtenthe article because “[t]he only route to racial, ethnic, or religious reconcilia-tion is through the distribution or dissemination of truth [and] of facts.”22

Clearly, the subject matter covered in this article went far beyond thespecific issue addressed by the AHA’s policy resolution condemning theallegation that Jews had played a disproportionate role in the African slavetrade, although the timing of the publication of the piece (Spring 1994)suggests that it may well have been one of the incidents that spurred theAHA’s resolution on February 8, 1995. It is perhaps not too difficult toextrapolate that the authors of the AHA policy resolution and the Davis-Drescher statement were aware of the types of excesses that could accom-

20. Ibid., 36-37.21. Ibid., 37.22. Ibid., 42.


pany the initial allegation about Jews and the slave trade and, although theydid not explicitly condemn the types of statements that appeared in theShropshire article, implied their condemnation through their unequivocalstatement against antisemitism.23 As we will see below, the deeper issues inthe case at KSU were the overall relationship of some members of the uni-versity community to the concept of the historical truth and, consequently,their assessment of both the “whiteness” of Jews and the Jewish response tothe article.

Upon publication, the article immediately struck a nerve amongfaculty members and subsequently split them into two rough factions,though neither faction openly supported either the methodology or the con-clusions reached by the student author. Instead, the split was based onwhether Uhuru should have published an article that carried false anddefamatory allegations about Jews as a corporate entity. This type of facultyinvolvement ensured that the ensuing debate would eventually include bothdetractors and supporters who were part of the established university struc-ture. It is for this reason that the administration in general was inclined totake what its members called a “balanced” view of the conflict in an attemptto promote dialogue and to use the article to create a “teachable moment”for the campus community that would be a “responsible way to engage inmore dialogue.”24 It was exactly this quest for evenhandedness, however,that suggested to some Jewish faculty and students that the issues at stakefor both Jews and the larger community were neither understood nor takenseriously at Kent State University.

A salient detail is that Uhuru was not formally affiliated with an aca-demic department but did have a faculty advisor from KSU’s Department ofPan-African Studies, both of which were influenced by theories of Afrocen-trism. The discourse surrounding the article was tinged with negative asser-tions about Afrocentrism, and thus the hostile reactions to the article wereoften understood by its defenders not only as criticism of the student authorand the student-run magazine but also of an academic unit of theuniversity.25

23. To read both the AHA policy resolution and the Davis-Drescher statement,see http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/1995/9503AHA.CFM.

24. Quotes are from KSU president Carol Cartwright in the article by DouglasFeiden, “Ohio Campus Torn by Tract Against Jews,” The Forward, April 14, 1995.

25. At the height of the conflict, Ken Calkins, a KSU history professor whoopposed the Uhuru editorial policy, sent several articles to his colleagues thatexplained some of the tenets of Afrocentrism, accompanied by this note: “Here is alittle light reading to wile away the time. I send it with some trepidation. You mustpromise to stop immediately if you begin to tense up. This is quite a revelation tome. It appears that [the Department of Pan-African Studies is] teaching a kind of


A resolution consisting of three short paragraphs was presented to theFaculty Senate on May 11, 1994, proposing that the Senate express its“deep concern” and claiming that the article was “marked by virulent anti-Semitism and devoid of reasoned argument or responsible scholarship.”The authors concluded that the article represented a “blatant attack upon thevalues of the University and should not have been published in a periodicalwhich is supported and publicly endorsed by major offices and programswithin our institution,” and asked that faculty connected to the publicationendeavor to teach “the methods and values involved in the scholarly pursuitof truth.”26 The resolution was tabled and a committee was formed to writea more general version that acknowledged other acts of racism andprejudice on campus.27

A group of concerned scholars sent a letter to the Senate outlining theirreaction to some of the major issues surrounding the controversy. Respond-ing to the charges of antisemitism made by those who opposed the article,they acknowledged that Shropshire made problematic references to “thelinkages between the Caucasian Race and the Jewish Religion and Culturein Eurasia,” and concluded that “The claims by many of this article’s criticsare true on this point, and from their perspective, they are justified inexpecting a disavowal of these references.”28

religion” (taken from a memo from Ken Calkins addressed to “Greer” and sent toother colleagues (Helga, Mark, Gary, David, and Mike), dated October 20, 1995.Calkins also copied a memo from George R. Garrison, the chair of the Departmentof Pan-African Studies, to Calkins, dated October 9, 1995, that included a proposedagenda for a meeting between members of the Department of Pan-African Studiesand those who opposed the Uhuru article. Calkins underlined and emphasized withan ironic exclamation point the proposed addition of “Semitism” as a subject toaccompany the discussion over Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism.

26. “Faculty Senate Resolutions,” Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Freedom and CivilDiscourse) (Spring 1995): 38-39.

27. Ibid. According to the editor(s), who appended an introduction to thereprinting of the resolutions in Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, “While Senators were gen-erally sympathetic with the resolution’s concern about the hostile tone of campusdiscourse, many were uncomfortable with the wording. Several expressed concernsabout the possibility of censorship implied by the call to reconsider Uhuru’s finan-cial support; and many objected to the resolution singling out Uhuru and Shrop-shire’s article as if this were the only significant act of intolerance to occur in Kentover the past academic year.”

28. Letter from E. Timothy Moore, acting chair of the Department of Pan-Afri-can Studies and the faculty advisor to Uhuru; Dr. Alene Barnes-Harden; Dr. Fran-cis Dorsey; Dr. Kwame Nantambu; and Dr. Meli Temu to Robert Johnson, chair ofthe Faculty Senate Executive Committee, and to the members of the Faculty Sen-ate, dated May 18, 1994. Reprinted in Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring 1995.


The members of this group, however, were not willing to condemn thepublication of the article, despite the fact that their letter had, somewhatobliquely, acknowledged its problematic content. The reasoning, whichwould be echoed by many others who would later defend the article, wasthat Shropshire was justified in articulating his rage and frustration becauseof the fact that he, along with the majority of the African-American com-munity, had been brutally oppressed by American society. In these facultymembers’ words: “Due to the fact of institutional racism and other forms ofbigotry and hatred that are a part of our larger society, our magazine hasallowed for the articulation of perceived or experienced levels of frustrationand anger that students have felt, and do feel, toward segments of society orwithin its smaller microcosm, the university.”29

Although those who wrote the letter admitted that they had not readany of the books cited in the Uhuru article, they contended that other Afri-can Americans, some of them “bitter from past and present injustices,” hadreached similar conclusions.30 This appeared to suggest that if the student—or others—had reached erroneous conclusions in the course of theirresearch, this was understood to be less important than the right to expressanger, pain, and frustration at societal injustice.

A second version of the original resolution, more general in its toneand language than the previous version, was drafted by a follow-up com-mittee and adopted by the Faculty Senate. This version referred to theFaculty Senate’s concern about “an increase in intolerance on campus aswell as in society at large” and listed several grievances, including anony-mous racist flyers distributed on campus, an anti-gay/lesbian display at theStudent Center, and derogatory depictions of women. It specifically men-tioned, however, the Uhuru article as “marked by virulent anti-Semitismand devoid of reasoned argument and serious scholarship. As such, it repre-sents a direct challenge to both the University’s academic values and itscommitment to encouraging respect for diversity.”31

Students who defended the article not only stood for the right of Uhuruto publish the article but also supported its methodology and conclusions ascorrect. The campus newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater, printed a letter fromAdisa A. Alkebulan, a senior in the Pan-African Studies Department andthe assistant editor of Uhuru, who wondered, “Why is it racist orantisemitic for Afrikan people to discuss their own history? Don’t we have

29. Ibid.30. Ibid.31. Kent State University Faculty Senate, Minutes of the Meeting, July 18,

1994. See also Roger J. Mezger, “KSU Faculty Senate Passes Anti-IntoleranceResolution,” Akron Beacon Journal, July 19, 1994.


that right?” He called the Faculty Senate’s resolution “racist,” and assertedthat most of the faculty were “unqualified to accurately and truthfully saythat the information in this article or any other publication indicating Jewishinvolvement in our holocaust is inaccurate.” He concluded that this was “avery touchy subject among European Jews and Judeophiles,” not because itwas an attack on Jews but because it was “a well researched issue” thatdrew a “painful conclusion.” Alkebulan called the issue “exaggerated” andalleged that the opponents of the Uhuru article were ignorant and racist.32

Later in the year, an advertisement signed by 300 members of the KSUfaculty and administration with the title, “A Call for Civil Discourse,” waspublished in the Daily Kent Stater. The ad condemned the Uhuru article as“blatantly antisemitic” and warned that:

[A]rticles such as the one in question pose a peculiar educationaldilemma. Refuting them point by point elevates an inflammatory and aca-demically indefensible article to the level of a serious scholarly docu-ment. Not responding opens the door to claims that silence confirms thevalidity of the data and charges as presented.33

One solution offered by those who supported the publication of thearticle was to issue a general invitation to those who opposed the article “totake this article and disprove it in an empirical and scholarly manner toshow that indeed Mr. Shropshire and all of the points that he raised, or theauthors/texts he cited were in actuality what your assertions suggest.”34 Forthe most part, those who supported the right of Uhuru to print Shropshire’sarticle welcomed the invitation as a positive attempt to begin a healing dia-logue on campus; the university administration, despite its condemnation ofthe content of the article, also promoted this strategy.

Thus, despite the misgivings of those who sponsored the advertisementcondemning the article, the “peculiar educational dilemma” that they hadhoped to avoid became the proposed solution. In the spring of 1995, a spe-cial issue of Uhuru, entitled Uhuru Na Mazungumzo: This TeachableMoment, was published. The issue comprised a reprint of the original arti-cle, “Paradox of European Jewry,” and nine response articles, three fromstudents and six from KSU faculty. Of the three student articles, two came

32. Adisa A. Alkebulan, Editorial, Daily Kent Stater, September 28, 1994.33. “Campus Campaign for Civil Discourse,” Daily Kent Stater, October 12,

1994. Later, the accusation was made that some of those who signed the advertise-ment only did so “as a result of pressure or because they thought it was the politi-cally correct thing to do (E. Timothy Moore, “Faculty Advisors’ Notes,” Uhuru NaMazungumzo [Spring 1995]).

34. Op. cit., Moore et al.


from editors of Uhuru who were supportive of the magazine’s right to pub-lish the article and one came from a self-identified Jewish student whoopposed the contents of the article. Of the six faculty contributions, twoopposed the article while the other four, although they may not haveembraced Shropshire’s conclusions, defended Uhuru’s right to publish thearticle.

The student editors of Uhuru expressed their disappointment that theyhad received relatively few submissions from those opposed to the article.While the student editors suggested that the reason for the scant number ofopposition pieces was that those who styled themselves adversaries werenot truly interested in sponsoring tolerance and understanding within thecampus community, those who opposed the article explained that they werenot interested in dignifying the original article with a response and, conse-quently, elevating its ideas to the status of legitimate debate.35

The edition ended with an appendix consisting of a bibliography of theworks that Shropshire used to write his article. The appendix was titled,“Notes: African-Jewish Relationship—Something to Cherish?” The firstfive works that were cited were followed by selective quotes that supportednot only Shropshire’s contentions but also accused Jews of racism andintolerance and made reference to the resolution passed in the GeneralAssembly of the United Nations in November 1975 that equated Zionismwith racism.36

35. This strategy of non-response, often used in connection with instances ofHolocaust denial, resulted in a dearth of material documenting Jewish reactions tothe incident.

36. Another 33 titles were listed with these prefatory comments: “A call numberlisted for any of the following books indicates they can be found in the Kent StateUniversity Library. (After this, there will be absolutely no excuse for the “distin-guished” professors, administrators, and other members of the community to useignorance, amnesia or slight memory loss as a justification for not speaking aboutthese issues)” [sic]. The rest of the special edition consisted of a note from Moorein his capacity as faculty advisor to the magazine; notes from the two student edi-tors; two poems that, albeit obliquely, expressed the views of those who supportedShropshire; a reprinting of the Faculty Senate Resolutions (with brief, introductorycomments), accompanied by a copy of Moore’s letter to the Faculty Senate and atranscript of the remarks of Dr. Richard Feinberg to the Faculty Senate (Feinbergcontributed an article supportive of Shropshire to the special edition of Uhuru); aneditorial piece by one of the student editors of Uhuru that was sent to the DailyKent Stater on September 28, 1994; a copy of the full-page advertisement taken outby the Campus Campaign for Civil Discourse in the Daily Kent Stater on October12, 1994; a resolution written by the Pan-African faculty and staff; a resolution ofsupport passed by the Black Graduate Student Association; and a postscript signed


The two faculty members who wrote in opposition to the article, his-tory professors Kenneth Calkins and Robert Swierenga, were careful topoint out the problems with Shropshire’s methods of scholarship. Theyaccomplished this, in part, by meticulously checking Shropshire’s numer-ous footnotes; indeed, Calkins acknowledged that one of the most “strikingcharacteristics” of the piece was the “large number of quotations and cita-tions of authority” that it contained. Nevertheless, he notes,

When one scrutinizes these sources, however, one soon discovers thatMr. Shropshire apparently had little interest in conveying what they actu-ally say about the issues he addresses. Of the seventeen direct quotationsI have been able to check, for example, only one is completely accurate.Some of Shropshire’s errors seem to be simply the product of slip-shodscholarship. On other occasions, however, it would appear that the quota-tions were altered with a calculated intention to mislead the reader . . .One of the reasons for his difficulty in providing accurate quotations,however, is that in at least six cases he has not gone directly to thesources himself, but has rather used quotations which appear in a bookpublished by the Nation of Islam entitled The Secret RelationshipBetween Blacks and Jews.37

Similarly, Swierenga added:

The facts are undeniable. Jews were not the instigators or major playersin the enslavement of Africans, either as traders or owners, and contem-porary Jewish scholars have not been silent about the involvement oftheir ancestors. Shropshire and his Nation of Islam tutors need to lookagain at the facts of history.38

Of the four faculty members who wrote in support of the article, twospecifically called attention to their own “whiteness” through their appealsto others of European descent to form their opinions of the article byattempting to understand it through the lens of the African-American expe-rience. Christina McVay, an instructor of English and German who was onthe faculty advisory board for Uhuru, expressed regret concerning the char-acterization of Judaism as a “gutter religion,” as well as other anti-Jewishexpressions and “inaccuracies” in the article, but reasoned that, althoughthis type of rhetoric was common in the black press, it was not the real

by four of the members of the Editorial Advisory Board, who also wrote supportivearticles for Uhuru.

37. Kenneth Calkins, “An Historian’s Response to Terry Shropshire,” Uhuru NaMazungumzo, Spring 1995, 14.

38. Richard Swierenga, “Jews and American Slavery,” Uhuru Na Mazungumzo,Spring 1995, 31.


problem. “I fear many of us educated white folks are missing the forest forthe trees,” McVay noted, and concluded, “[I]t all boils down to the perva-sive and longstanding ignorance of whites (including Jews) regarding theblack experience, and more importantly, the refusal to acknowledge thatthere is much in that experience worth learning.” In trying to characterizethe relations between the two groups, McVay claimed that the root cause ofwhat was termed “black antisemitism” was the lack of acknowledgement bywhite people of black suffering and asked her white readers to consider theissue “from the black perspective.” To do so, she suggested asking a num-ber of questions:

Why does the U.S. now have a National Holocaust Museum but nomuseum dedicated to the people upon whose backs this country was quiteliterally built? (And if we did have one, would throngs of Americans visitit, as they do the museum in Washington?) Why do taxpayers say nothingabout the billions of dollars we send to Israel every year but begrudgeevery dollar that goes to inner-city schools? Why had six out of thetwenty white students in one of my classes last spring seen Schindler’sList while none had seen Malcolm X, which had been in the theaters afew months longer? Why are Jews called the Chosen People? And doesthat mean that their suffering counts for more than that of blacks? Why isthe Jewish Holocaust treated with awe and respect, while the AfricanHolocaust is passed over as though it is insignificant? In short, why dowe believe we must remember the gas chamber but not the auctionblock?39

Clearly, some of McVay’s questions (and particularly the one pertain-ing to “the Chosen People”) betrayed an irritation toward Jewish claims ofvictimization, as well as discomfort with the concept of a collective Jewishidentity as an oppressed minority group. This impression was confirmed inthe next paragraph, when she referred to “the ultimate paradox that Ameri-can Jews—acknowledged victims—are living very well these days,” andreminded her readers that some blacks “are skeptical now about the motivesbehind Jewish participation in [the Civil Rights] movement.” McVay justi-fied the anger in the black community through the “desire to reveal Jews asmore than simply long-suffering victims, but as victimizers as well,” andconcluded, “Our nation, especially those of us in education, must take stepsto ensure that no more generations of Americans of any color are allowed topass through our educational system without gaining the same reverence

39. Christina McVay, “Speaking of Paradox,” Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring1995.


and respect for the black experience that most of us have for the Jewishexperience.”40

The confidence with which McVay asserted her conclusion that Amer-icans demonstrated “reverence and respect” for the Jewish experience wasrooted in her assessment of Jewish whiteness. This was echoed in an articleby Richard Feinberg, professor of anthropology, who wrote, “[T]he Kentcommunity owes Shropshire and Uhuru a debt of gratitude for raisingimportant issues and forcing us to talk about them openly.” While heacknowledged Shropshire’s “incendiary language,” Feinberg reasoned thatsuch verbiage obscured a complex set of societal problems and readersshould focus more on what the author was trying to accomplish than on theaccuracy of the article itself. Therefore, he asserted,

What seems to bother Shropshire is that some Jews call upon historicaloppression as a license for self-righteous indignation, and they are some-times so caught up in their own suffering that they fail to notice whentheir actions injure others. I have heard comments from Jews regardingArabs (and occasionally blacks or other peoples of color) that are asblindly hostile as the most offensive passages in Shropshire’s essay.41

Feinberg concluded by petitioning “whites, and particularly Jews, toavoid over-reaction.” The rhetoric contained in Shropshire’s article, hehypothesized, while it may have seemed “unfair” to Jews, was essentiallyharmless because blacks “have little institutional power and limited oppor-tunity to cause you serious injury.”42

The two essays excerpted above demonstrate that the much of the dis-course surrounding Shropshire’s article was not simply a case of what somemight label “black antisemitism” or even a black-Jewish disagreement.43

Rather, they provide a window into a campus culture in which the label ofJewish “whiteness” was, according to some members of the KSU commu-nity, enough to render Jewish objections to blatant falsehoods about Jews

40. Ibid.41. Richard Feinberg, “Jews, Africans, and Human Liberation: Reflections on

Terry Shropshire’s ‘Paradox of Eastern Jewry,’ ” Uhuru Na Mazungumzo, Spring1995.

42. Ibid.43. An online version of a publication by the ADL, entitled Schooled in Hate:

Anti-Semitism on Campus (1997), did not list the incidence at KSU under the head-ing “Black Anti-Semitism” but included it under the more general rubric “Exam-ples of Serious Campus Anti-Semitic Incidents.” This Web page is titled “Schooledin Hate: Anti-Semitism on Campus” and subtitled “Specific Examples of SeriousAnti-Semitic Incidents,” from the Anti-Defamation League Web site, http://www.adl.org/sih/SIH-Examples.asp, accessed December 28, 2011.


and Judaism irrelevant and even mean-spirited. Thus, even though it isundeniably true that American Jews have benefited handsomely from whatis referred to as “white privilege” in American society in general, one won-ders whether the “whiteness” of Jews can be seen a disadvantage specifi-cally within the milieu of the campus.

Naturally, the students affiliated with Uhuru supported the right of theperiodical to publish Shropshire’s piece. Editor Enloe Wilson wonderedabout “the true motivation of the onslaught [of criticism],” especiallybecause, despite the “humbly admitted mistakes” of Shropshire’s article, “anotable body of similar works” came to the same conclusions. For Wilson,the real issue was that:

Many have speculated as to whether the true underlying source of dis-comfort has been Shropshire’s supposedly elaborate excursions in“twisted logic” or “alternate truths,” or the fact that a student of color(especially an Afrikan student) had the nerve—the gall to study a compo-nent of a European people’s history and to be forthright in expressingalarm at what he found.44

Assistant editor Alkebulan hypothesized that the article gave people“the opportunity to attack Afrocentricity in general and the Department ofPan-African Studies and Black United Students in particular,” and com-mented on the absurdity of putting “oppressed people in the position ofdefending themselves against being racist and antisemitic.”45

Only one student essay appeared in the special issue that opposed thecontent of the Uhuru article. Mirroring the tendency of students who sup-ported the article to use more strident language than the faculty who did so,this student, Stephen Weinberg, was willing to make more controversialallegations than those of the faculty members who opposed the publicationof the article. Weinberg asserted that an “ideology” allowing hostilitytoward Jews and Jewish issues had made a negative impact on contempo-rary campus culture. He contextualized the article with his contention thatsimilar incidents had taken place across the country, and claimed that rheto-ric such as Shropshire’s was proof that “hate is being legitimized in theclassroom.” While Weinberg did not specifically point to black studies pro-grams, he alleged that:

44. Enloe Wilson, “This Teachable Moment,” Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Spring1995): 77-78.

45. Adisa A. Alkebulan, “Lessons Learned,” Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Spring1995): 80-81.


At many universities, and Kent as well, resources are being diverted intoprograms that are distant and separate from the main campus communityand its goals. These programs abandon academics and instead allow ideo-logical indoctrination to flourish. The result of this has been racist dogmajustified behind the tutelage of multicultural education, and its variousoffshoots.46

Weinberg was prepared to attack the entire edifice of multiculturallearning, condemning the “cultural relativity” that he felt “serve[d] todeconstruct any notion of universal values and universal knowledge.” Hecautioned that those who touted the benefits of multiculturalism, like thesupporters of the article, were able to lay claim to absolute knowledge ofthe subjects of their choice and could argue that, “Anyone who disagreeswith them has simply soaked up the views of what is perceived as the domi-nant, oppressive, societal view.” At the same time, the ideas advanced byShropshire’s article could be validated simply because they were “widelyheld” in the black community. Such a stance promoted intolerance, Wein-berg claimed, because it assumed that attitudes are racially based. There-fore, even though the article was shown to be historically inaccurate, “theonly possible claim for its validity must be made on ethnic grounds.”47 ForWeinberg, this meant that the right to criticize Uhuru was unfairly por-trayed as a politicized racial issue.48

Weinberg expressed his disappointment over the aftermath of the inci-dent, focusing specifically on the responses of some of the KSU faculty,whom he characterized as “not interested in truth.” Similarly, he intimatedthat Jewish students were powerless in the face of politically motivatedanti-Jewish rhetoric because of the prevailing climate of opinion on campusand its indebtedness to concepts of multiculturalism. “There is nothing

46. Stephen Weinberg, “Legitimizing Hate,” Uhuru Na Mazungumzo (Spring1995): 32.

47. Ibid., 32-34. Weinberg also published an opinion piece in the Daily KentStater in which he echoed various faculty members’ assertions that Shropshire usedhis sources and quotes incorrectly, mostly because of his reliance on The SecretRelationship Between Blacks and Jews (Steven B. Weinberg, “Jews Not Solely toBlame for Slave Trade,” Daily Kent Stater, October 12, 1994).

48. Other articles used for this section on Uhuru include: Douglas Feiden,“Kent State University, Ohio Campus Torn by Tract Against Jews,” The Forward,April 14, 1995; Marcy Oster, “Book May Drive Deeper Wedge between KSU’sBlacks, Jews,” Cleveland Jewish News, Friday, April 14, 1995; “Notebook,”Chronicle of Higher Education, May 12, 1995.


[Jewish students] can do except congregate at the Hillel House and preparefor the next attack,” Weinberg alleged.49

The animosity that Weinberg, as a student of the 1990s, harboredtoward the concept of multiculturalism is particularly salient. According toAmerican studies scholar Matthew Frye Jacobson, “Multiculturalism as acoherent phenomenon captured little attention until the 1990s,” even thoughit had been building as a movement for the previous twenty years and hadits roots in the formation of the New Left. Specifically, as the New Leftfragmented and group-specific identity politics surged, a relationship wasformed “between Civil Rights-New Left activism, education, andmulticulturalism.”50

Perhaps unsurprisingly, a number of Jews in the heyday of the NewLeft in the late 1960s and early 1970s expressed discomfort concerningantipathy toward Jews and Jewish issues, particularly the prevailing dis-course over the state of Israel, in the political rhetoric that was such anintegral part of campus culture at that time.51 Eric Goldstein has alsoargued that Jews were not entirely comfortable with the postwar descriptionof Jewishness as an ethnicity because it “did not totally resolve the dilem-mas of asserting a distinctive identity in a society organized around thecategories of ‘black’ and ‘white.’ ” By the mid-1960s, when the emergenceof black nationalist groups led to a redefinition of whiteness that stressedthe negative aspects of attachment to the dominant group, some Jews beganto look for ways to reassert their group distinctiveness.52

That there would then be Jews who expressed discomfort with mul-ticulturalism and the place of Jews within that discourse was certainly inkeeping with that earlier tradition. Indeed, a number of analysts havereferred to the difficulties that Jews faced when they tried to assert them-selves qua Jews within the multicultural discourse that was a pronounced

49. Weinberg’s comment was taken from Oster’s article in the Cleveland Jew-ish News (see note 40).

50. Jacobson, 226-28.51. See, for instance, Arnold Forster and Benjamin R. Epstein, The New Anti-

Semitism (New York: McGraw Hill, 1974); Martin Peretz, “The American Left andIsrael,” Commentary, Vol. 44, No. 5 (November 1967); Milton Himmelfarb, “In theLight of Israel’s Victory,” Commentary, Vol. 44, No. 4 (October 1967); SeymourMartin Lipset, “The Return of Anti-Semitism as a Political Force,” in Israel, theArabs and the Middle East, eds. Irving Howe and Carl Gershman (New York:Bantam Books, 1972); Seymour Martin Lipset, “The Socialism of Fools: The Left,the Jews, and Israel,” Encounter, December 1969.

52. Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness, 190, 208.


characteristic of campus culture in the 1990s.53 Political philosopher MarlaBrettschneider, for instance, discussed the need for “careful, reflective anal-ysis of the role, importance, and even the dangers of multiculturalism to theJewish community.” While she and others have acknowledged the positiveimpact of multiculturalism through the freedom that Jews have found toincorporate their Jewishness with their political progressivism,Brettschneider also warned that:

As identities become fair game in politics, Jewishness takes a beatingfrom the Left in ways Jews are usually more accustomed to beingattacked from the Right. Even in a politics that courageously seeks tounderstand, name, and overcome oppression as well as to rethink andrewrite history, historic antisemitic fantasies have resurfaced at times—now from marginalized, rather than powerful, groups—about how Jewsrun the world and are to blame for all the world’s problems. Recentmedia attention to particular antisemitic Black Muslim speakers or the“Holocaust hoax” problem only amplifies what Jews and multiculturallyoriented student activists have faced every day around the country. Thecampus has felt like a battleground and Jews too often have found com-plications with progressive efforts to diversify canonically based curric-ula. Despite our community’s apparent success, we remain marginalizedfrom the majority Christian culture; adding insult to injury, despite ourminority status and experience, often we are marginalized in multicul-tural circles.54

Similarly, analysts Jeffrey Ross and Melanie Schneider explored therelationship between multiculturalism and anti-Jewish hostility on Ameri-can campuses when they wrote:

[These problems are] compounded and, to a degree, made possible bymany of the trends in academe that are included under the otherwisewell-intentioned phenomenon of multiculturalism. They include pres-sures to modify traditional academic standards in admissions, faculty hir-ing, and curriculum development as campuses are subject topoliticization and made to respond to claims of group entitlements.55

53. See, for instance, Peter F. Langman, Jewish Issues in Multiculturalism: AHandbook for Educators and Clinicians (Jerusalem: Jason Aronson Inc., 1999),and Sanford Gutman, “The Marginalization of Antisemitism in Multicultural Cur-ricula,” in Approaches to Antisemitism: Context and Curriculum, ed. Michael GaryBrown (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1994).

54. Marla Brettschneider, “Multiculturalism, Jews, and Democracy: Situatingthe Discussion,” in The Narrow Bridge: Jewish Views on Multiculturalism, ed.Marla Brettschneider (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 1-2.

55. Ross and Schneider, 268.


Ross and Schneider, however, were also careful to point out that theseissues were not necessarily the norm on American campuses. “Paradoxi-cally,” as they explained, “these disturbing trends have emerged at the sametime that American colleges and universities have witnessed an unprece-dented flowering of Jewish achievement.”56 In other words, Ross andSchneider (and Brettschneider) were in agreement that multiculturalism asan ideology or a general discourse was not in and of itself the problem.Thus, if multiculturalism itself is not the issue, we might ask what factor orfactors were subsumed under the rubric of multiculturalism that allowed forthe falsification of history that is part of both Holocaust denial and accusa-tions about disproportionate Jewish culpability for the African slave trade?

In the case of Uhuru at Kent State University, the author of the articlein question, as well as some of its supporters, were fairly open in theiremphasis on Jewish “whiteness” as a reason that the article, whether or notit adhered to standards of objective truth, was an example of protected polit-ical speech rather than an antisemitic screed. In this case, my contentionconcerning Jewish “whiteness” as a salient factor is fairly easy to support.In other words, as Sander L. Gilman has observed, “Jews are simply dis-missed as ‘white’” in the multicultural discourse. Further, once theybecame white, “they [are] quickly lumped with the forces of patriarchy andoppression by the new voices of multiculturalism. Their ‘whiteness’ seemsto deny them any presence in a world of hybridity defined by skin color ascultural difference.”57

The perhaps unintended side effect of this use of Jewish “whiteness,”though, was that it offered protection for other antisemitic rhetoric, includ-ing that which pilloried Jews, however obliquely, for reasons based on non-“whiteness,” under its wide umbrella. As we have seen, for many of thosewho espouse Holocaust denial, the underlying issue, whether it is openlydisclosed or not, is that Jews are different from white, Christian Europeans.Many of the deniers who harbor personal antipathy toward Jews, however,take great pains to mask their hatred with a pseudo-scholarly veneer thatpresents Holocaust denial as legitimate revisionist history rather than baseantisemitism. And it was this pretense of intellectual inquiry and academicneutrality that lent a sort of credence to the deniers’ basic argument aschampions of freedom of speech and allowed them to portray Holocaust

56. Ibid., 268, 277.57. Sander L. Gilman, Multiculturalism and the Jews (New York: Routledge,

2006), 180. In an article, Gilman writes about the marginalization of Jews withinthe discourse of multiculturalism while simultaneously using Jews as a model forthe multicultural (Sander L. Gilman, “ ‘We’re Not Jews’: Representing ‘Jews’ inContemporary Multicultural Literature,” Modern Judaism, Vol. 23, No. 2 [2003]).


denial as one more in a series of controversial political topics that chal-lenged Establishment norms and values.

In short, the argument may be made that those who portrayed Jews aswhite Europeans in order to subject them to anti-Jewish hostility in theguise of protected political speech offered sanctuary to those whose under-lying objective was to attack Jews because they were different from whiteEuropeans. Both groups espoused antisemitic canards when they attackedJews, but the anti-Jewish hostility that each group expressed was based on adifferent assessment of the Jewish relationship to “whiteness.” Thus, Jewish“whiteness” was the salient factor that allowed both groups, however dis-similar in methods and members that they might have been, to promulgateinaccurate historical narratives concerning Jews and to insist that suchfalsehoods were to be welcomed because of the tenets of academic freedomand freedom of speech. And it was the growing prevalence of this type offalsehood that led, in turn, to the AHA’s decision to issue two differentstatements about historical truth that both involved Jews and Jewish history.

Neither the advent of the modern age nor modernity itself was thereason that Jews suffered in the 19th and 20th centuries from antisemitism.Instead, the classification of Jews as a race was the salient factor encom-passed by the general rubric of modernity, which eventually led to the mur-derous campaign against European Jewry. Similarly, multiculturalism mayhave been the overarching climate within which both types of anti-Jewishhostility in the 1990s were made possible, but multiculturalism in and ofitself was not the reason that Jews found themselves in a difficult positionvis-a-vis the multicultural discourse on campus. The salient factor in thatinstance was the relationship that Jews were imagined to have with the con-cept of “whiteness.”

To bring this argument to a close, we might take a brief look at thesituation of Jews on campus in contemporary times and note that some ana-lysts have claimed that the campus, more than any other sector of Americansociety, has proved to be susceptible to expressions of anti-Jewish hostility,particularly in the period after World War II.58 I would offer the caveat that

58. See Phyllis Chesler, The New Antisemitism: The Current Crisis and WhatWe Must Do About It (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003), 143-49, 215-16; GabrielSchoenfeld, The Return of Anti-Semitism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004),120-23; Gary Tobin, Aryeh K. Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer, The Uncivil University(San Francisco: The Institute for Jewish and Community Research, 2005). For acritical assessment of some of these books, see Jerome A. Chanes, “How, Why,Who Hates Us: Various Takes on Old and New Antisemitisms,” The Forward,November 27, 2009. In this book review, Chanes recommends a recent book onantisemitism: Murray Baumgarten, Peter Kenez, and Bruce Thompson, eds., Vari-eties of Antisemitism: History, Ideology, Discourse (Newark: University of Dela-


such statements must be tempered by the fact that Jewish students andfaculty, by most standards, are thriving on American campuses. They arerepresented disproportionately at many colleges and universities, includingsome of the most prestigious campuses in the nation. Jewish studies pro-grams continue to grow, and the student group Hillel is highly successful.Still, this general state of affairs may well lead us to ask about the lossesthat Jews as a collective have sustained in order to make such impressivegains. As David Biale, Susannah Heschel, and Michael Galchinskyreminded us, at the close of the 1990s,

Never before have so few barriers existed to Jews’ entering the corridorsof political, cultural, and economic power. Yet the path to integration hasalso created enormous contradictions in Jewish self-consciousness. Iden-tification and integration with the majority stands at odds with the Jews’equal desire to preserve their identity as a minority.59

In short, the desire of some American Jews to maintain a particularJewish identity conflicts with their designation as part of the “white” Amer-ican majority. For many Jews in the United States, possibly even the major-ity, the conflation of Jews and “whiteness” is not problematic because ofthe benefits such a designation can confer upon the bearer. Thus, Jewishdifference may well be acceptable to the larger community when it ispresented under the encompassing label of Euro-American difference.60 Butif Jews, in this case Jewish students, view themselves as separate fromothers of European heritage and ask others to acknowledge this type ofparticularity, they can be rejected because of the dictates of the surroundingcampus culture. As Biale, Heschel, and Galchinsky note, Jews are a“boundary case,” occupying a liminal zone of identity that makes them“insiders who are outsiders and outsiders who are insiders.”61

Relying in part on their examinations of the paradox of the anomalousstatus of Jews in 21st-century America, a number of contemporary scholarscontinue to probe the limits to the ways that Jews and Jewish issues are

ware Press, 2009) and especially Yehuda Bauer’s essay, “Problems ofContemporary Antisemitism” as a counterbalance to the books listed above.

59. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, “Introduction:The Dialectic of Jewish Enlightenment,” in Insider/Outsider: American Jews andMulticulturalism, eds. David Biale, Michael Galinchy, and Susannah Heschel(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 5.

60. Richard D. Allen has argued for the diminution of ethnic identity amongAmericans of European heritage in Ethnic Identity: The Transformation of WhiteAmerica (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).

61. David Biale, Michael Galchinsky, and Susannah Heschel, “Introduction:The Dialectic.”


accepted within contemporary campus culture. Gary Tobin, Aryeh Kauf-mann Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer have looked at the overall climate of thecampus and the problems that Jewish students face when they identify aspart of the larger Jewish community or with certain Jewish issues. EunicePollack has expressed concern over what she sees as a resurgence ofantisemitism on American campuses. And, perhaps most germane to thistopic, Kenneth L. Marcus has examined the need to place Jewish studentsunder the protections of civil rights laws so that they will have recourse inthe event of damaging anti-Jewish or anti-Israel actions and rhetoric to seeklegal assistance. In the course of developing this project, Marcus has arguedthat some of the most damaging anti-Jewish rhetoric on today’s collegecampuses involve efforts to reracialize Jewishness as “preeminently white”and therefore imbued with racist and colonial guilt.62

We know, too, that there are those who see the focus of contemporaryanti-Jewish hostility on campus as a product of antipathy toward the state ofIsrael that goes beyond legitimate criticism and should be calledantisemitic. Often, this phenomenon is labeled “the new antisemitism.” Totie this into the larger themes of this essay, there are those who assertedlong ago that much of the hostility toward Israel is based on the perceptionthat Israel is a “white” and imperialist nation.63 As Gilman explains,“among many non-Jewish multicultural writers the fantasy of a monolithic‘Zionism’ has become the enemy of the ‘multicultural.’ ”64 Thus, it maywell be that the trouble that some Jewish students have found in answeringthe charges against Israel have to do not only with the perceived “white-ness” of the country but also with their own “whiteness” and the culpabilitythat this implies.

Perhaps another salient factor that we must consider if we view theJewish experience on campus through the lens of “whiteness,” though, isthat while Volume One of the Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jewswas published in 1991, Volume Two was more recently released in 2010.The subtitle of the new release is How Jews Gained Control of the BlackAmerican Economy. Whether or not this particular volume will make a newand different impact on reactions to Jews and Jewish issues on campus, ofcourse, remains to be seen.

62. Gary Tobin, Aryeh K. Weinberg, and Jenna Ferer, 2005; Eunice G. Pollack,ed., Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present (Boston: Academic StudiesPress, 2011); Kenneth L. Marcus, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

63. See, for instance, Percy Cohen, Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews (NewYork: Academic Press, 1980), and the authors listed in note 43.

64. Gilman, 181.


*Linda Maizels is the Faculty Fellow in Jewish Studies at Colby College. Sherecently completed her doctorate at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contempo-rary Jewry, a division of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University ofJerusalem. Her dissertation was entitled “Charter Members of the Fourth World:Jewish Student Identity and the ‘New Antisemitism’ on American Campuses,1967-1994.”

Holocaust Envy:The Libidinal Economy of the New Antisemitism1

Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr.*

According to the cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek, “enjoyment,” in the psy-choanalytic sense, should be understood as the paradoxical satisfactionproduced by a painful encounter with an impossible “Thing” that upsetsthe balance of the pleasure principle. Nowadays, the Holocaust—or,more specifically, Jews’ perceived (fantasized) enjoyment of it—hasbecome just such a fascinating and disconcerting, seductively irritatingobject of obsessive overinvestment for the “new antisemitism.” In aLacanian reading of the foundations of human rights discourse, a patho-logical “Holocaust envy” is diagnosed as a symptom of neo-antisemit-ism’s rivalrous identification with Jews.

Key Words: Antisemitism, Envy, Holocaust, Jouissance, Lacan,Psychoanalysis

1. This paper was originally prepared as a pair of talks, and retains some ofthat character. First (as “Post-Holocaust, Postcolonial Theory”), it was part of apanel presentation, on post-Zionism and the Holocaust, at the Association for IsraelStudies 27th International Conference (organized around the theme of “Israel as aJewish and Democratic State”), Brandeis University, June 13-15, 2011. Second (as“Enjoyment of the Holocaust: The Latest ‘Thing’ in Antisemitism”), it was givenas a lecture at the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies (CHGS) at theUniversity of Minnesota, Minneapolis, September 15, 2011. I wish to thank theorganizers of the Brandeis conference, the attendees, and my co-panelists—EugeneSheppard (chair), Elhanan Yakira, Bruno Chaouat, and Robert Meister—for theirinsightful comments. I thank Bruno Chaouat additionally, in his role as director ofCHGS, for arranging my visit there, and the wonderful audience on that occasionfor a stimulating discussion of my work. Thanks, however, in one case are notenough: I wish therefore to dedicate this essay to my teacher and friend of manyyears, Robert Meister, who long ago played a priceless role in my learning tounderstand the politics of enjoyment (and the enjoyment of political theory). Wemay disagree in important ways about Israel and other sub-theoretical details (theflaws in the argument you are about to read, needless to say, are entirely myresponsibility), but Bob’s intellectual curiosity and integrity of mind, at onceplayful and serious, remain for me the most pure and infectious I have everencountered. For that inspiration, among other things, I am forever grateful. Thispaper could not have been written had I not once been privileged to serve as ateaching assistant in his legendary course, “After Evil,” nor without his recentlypublished book of the same name. Individual citations to that text in what followscannot do justice to the intellectual debt this paper owes to that rich and importantvolume.

489


The Other is he who essentially steals my own enjoyment.—Jacques-Alain Miller2

Why is it that American academic anti-Zionism so frequently chal-lenges, distorts, or seeks to appropriate Jewish Holocaust memory? Tounderstand this is to understand the way in which a new antisemitism hasarisen, paradoxically, from envy for what in psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’sterms can be understood as an imagined Jewish/Israeli “enjoyment” of theirown past collective suffering. The antisemitic thought process proceeds inthis way: The Other deprives me of my true “enjoyment,” or, what I mosturgently require, namely my innermost capacity to feel, in my bones, that Iam living fully—and I want it back. So . . . I plan to retake from him thismissing affective substance, my jouissance, “in return” for the (fantasized)harm he has done me “initially.” Thus does one of the fundamental tropesof racism appear, typically, according to Lacanian cultural theorist SlavojZizek, as the largely unconscious conviction that the Other is always—andalready—responsible for my miserable lack of existential heft. If I canneither feel successful no matter what I do nor even suffer my endemicfailure properly (if, in other words, something is always missing), it isbecause my neighbor, who is really an alien and doesn’t belong here, is ametaphysical gonif—someone from whom, not incidentally, I am thereforelegally, morally, and above all libidinally entitled to steal/reclaim all that Ican for myself.

Racist enjoyment is the (real enough, albeit frustrated) perverse enjoy-ment of the Other’s (imaginary, albeit nonetheless alluring) enjoyment.Racist desire manifests reactively, as a symptom in the form of a fantasy ofthe Other’s desire—a necessary misrecognition, constitutive of the racistsubject’s very identity. Antisemitic fantasies provide the paradigm case:

In terms of racism, the intersubjective element of fantasy means that,paradoxically, the racist stages the desire of his victim. The racist, con-fronted with the abyss of the Jew’s desire, makes sense of it by construct-ing a fantasy in which the Jew is at the center of some nefarious plot. . . .In this way, the desire of the racist to rid the country of Jews is actually ameans of concealing the anxiety generated by the desire of the Jews.3

2. Quoted in Slavoj Zizek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and theCritique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 203. Subsequent ref-erences to this edition appear cited in the text.

3. Tony Myers, Slavoj Zizek (New York: Routledge, 2003), 98. Subsequentreferences to this edition appear cited in the text.

2011] HOLOCAUST ENVY 491

Today, aiming less to rid a given country of its Jews than to rid the world ofthe Jewish State, the “new antisemitism” follows a similar but distinct logic.

For the postmodern antisemite, it is not so much the desire of Jews perse, but that of Israel, that generates anxiety. The nefarious plot is no longerwhatever it was Jews were supposed to be up to in Europe, but what Israelis supposed to be up to in the Middle East. The latter, it is believed, issupported by an inordinate possessiveness concerning the Holocaust and theprivileges this custodianship is felt to confer. Therefore, in a symptomaticwish to “retrieve” the memory and meaning of the Holocaust from greedyJewish hands, the new antisemite desires the delegitimization of a nationseen as founded on (illicit) “enjoyment” of the Holocaust.

Following Jacques Lacan in his later period, Zizek sometimes refers tothis sort of investment in the Other’s imagined enjoyment as sinthome (inthe antique French spelling of the term), in order to emphasize its structur-ing role for subjectivity. The subject not only “suffers” from its sinthome; itneeds to suffer from it in order to be itself—the subject that it is. In thisunderstanding of symptom/sinthome, it is important to emphasize that “ifthe symptom is dissolved, the subject itself loses the ground under his feet,disintegrates. . . . [A]ll his ontological consistency hangs on, is suspendedfrom his symptom, is ‘externalized’ in his symptom.”4 Without the structur-ing effect of a peculiarly “central” symptom, in other words, there is noreality as the subject postulates it, and no subject either.

With this in mind, is it hard to see that Israel, in the eyes of its detrac-tors, serves as the world’s sinthome after the end of the Cold War—forwhat other nation on the map is talked about as if perhaps it doesn’t belongthere? Israel’s “unnaturalness” is in this regard is a key to the spurioussense of entitlement enjoyed narcissistically by the rest. In other words:Since, in fact, as historians well know, all nationalities and perforce allnation-states and national boundaries are (many of them recent) humanlymade political constructs, to talk about one in particular as if it alone were“guilty” of being more invented than the others is to allow the rest thefantasy of their own ostensibly more “substantial” identities. Jews who sup-port the existence of Israel, or even those who are merely associated with itmetonymically, risk embodying racist enjoyment as the symptomatic stand-in for the evils of the world.

4. Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out(Routledge: New York, 1992), 154.


THE NEW ANTI-ZIONISM

Such scapegoating is not entirely new, of course, but it has gottenworse—as I will maintain—with the rise of human rights discourse as theconsensual idiom of an increasingly global legal-moral order. In such a con-text, the Holocaust plays a crucial role as the imagined source of legitimacy(or illegitimacy) both of Israel alone, as one nation among others, and alsoof the community of nations (the others plus Israel). For only in such anideological environment does it make sense that, as Edward Alexanderwarned presciently nearly two decades ago, “the campaign to steal the Hol-ocaust from its Jewish victims [threatens to] remove whatever impedimentsof conscience may yet stand in the way of the anti-Israel crusade.”5 Forwhere conscience (or super-ego) is at stake, in a competition over scarceresources under capitalism, the “best” way to evade censorship, unleashdesire, and appropriate the desired object is to assert property rights. Thus,what Alexander spied the roots of—the self-righteous campaign to redress aprimal Jewish “theft of enjoyment” from the world at large, a movementfortified excessively by the indignant perception that too much is made ofJewish suffering—is now in full swing, thanks in part to the expansion ofan international order that makes everyone, in principle, equally a victim orpotential victim of human rights abuse. And the politics of representation ata deep level, not only consciously, but at the level of “enjoyment as a politi-cal factor,”6 have never been worse for Israel—seen as the victim/survivornation par excellence, and therefore the one that gets away with enjoyingthis status “too much.”

Well-publicized fights over the meaning of the Holocaust around theworld,7 therefore—as what one might call a Jewish and democratic geno-cide—have implications, affectively as well as cognitively, for the conceptof a “Jewish and democratic state” (Israel’s longstanding self-definition). Ineach case, those impatient with the first term in the equation (Jewish anddemocratic), and who therefore can’t see what it has to do with the second(particular and universal), have important things in common. In influentialsectors of the academy, post-Zionism and postcolonial theory harmonize asmutually supportive ways of being “post-Holocaust”—in the sense of

5. Edward Alexander, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas (New Brunswick,NJ: Transaction, 1994), 206. Subsequent reference to this edition appears cited inthe text.

6. “Enjoyment as a political factor” is the subtitle of Zizek’s second book inEnglish. See Slavoj Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as aPolitical Factor (New York: Verso, 1991).

7. For example, in Europe, and particularly France; in the Middle East, andnotably Iran.


being, in effect, “over it.” The post-Holocaust postcolonial post-Zionist canthus dispense with the very idea of a Jewish state, because he has revisedhis estimation of the “proper meaning” of the Holocaust—in order to trans-gress a once potent taboo and go “beyond” notions, seen as myths/ideolo-gies, of the event’s uniqueness. Thus, an alt-neu prejudice (does not “newantisemitism” sound almost like an oxymoron, given the longevity of Jew-hatred?) adopts a distinctly anti-Zionist shape, as Israel’s Jewish-majoritypopulation is pilloried for supposedly mismanaging the memory, meaning,and significance of their tragedy.

Understood as the ideological cornerstone of post-World War II globalcivil society, the memory of the Nazi Holocaust of the Jews can both grantlegitimacy and take it away. The philosopher and public intellectual Ber-nard-Henri Levy articulates the nexus of attitudes that must be under-stood—ventriloquizing today’s Israel/Holocaust-obsessed Judeophobia—asfollows:

We have nothing against Jews, the new antisemite protests, as always.What we’re against is [1] people who traffic in their own memory . . . and[2] push out the memories of others . . . for [3] the sole purpose of legiti-mizing an illegitimate state.8

These three pillars, as Levy calls them, of the new anti-Zionist antisemit-ism—the belief that Jews and the Jewish State run a Holocaust industry, bymeans of which they monopolize compassion for racist/colonialist pur-poses—are mutually interdependent, and so my analysis necessarilytouches on each. But the heart of the matter, the problem on which I there-fore concentrate from here—the linchpin joining the rest—is surely the sec-ond of the three elements Levy identifies: the accusation that Jews hoardstockpiles of suffering, thus leaving insufficient funds of pity in circulationfor others—who are also miserable but haven’t got access to the libidinalbacking needed to capitalize their suffering and mass-market it to theworld—because the Jews have taken more than their share.

THE HOLOCAUST THING—GENOCIDE AND JOUISSANCE

Holocaust envy, or genocide jouissance, is not to be understood asjealousy concerning the actual events of the Holocaust itself, but rather asthe enjoyment of the memory of the Shoah, perceived perversely as a kindof privilege accorded to Jews. Since the notion of skimming surplus com-passion—expropriating, stockpiling, and reinvesting someone else’s right-

8. Bernard-Henri Levy, Left in Dark Times (New York: Random House,2008), 158.


ful quantum of affect, in order to make a tidy moral profit for oneself—canonly be a fantasy; I have invoked contemporary psychoanalysis to explainit. Keeping in mind that enjoyment is not to be confused with pleasure, but,following Zizek, should be understood as the “paradoxical satisfaction pro-duced by a painful encounter with a Thing that perturbs the equilibrium ofthe ‘pleasure principle’ ” (280), I maintain that the Holocaust—or, morespecifically, Jews’ perceived (fantasized) enjoyment of it—has become justsuch a perturbing Thing, the object of an obsessive libidinal investment onthe part of today’s new antisemite. It is the antisemite’s new Thing, and thusthe latest thing in antisemitism.

The Thing, in Lacanese, is whatever incarnates jouissance, or enjoy-ment. In the post-World War II libidinal economy of human rights, theThing—the real thing, what it’s “all about,” or, in Zizek’s words again,“what gives plenitude and vivacity to our [way of] life”—what allows us to“live fully” as who we really are—is the thought of genocide and the worldcommunity’s stand against it, in which we participate as global citizens(201). This community of civilized nations defines itself in principle by theexclusion of genocide and genocidal regimes, which are to be counted ascriminal and therefore not regimes whose borders have to be respected.Those who commit or threaten to commit genocide risk loss of standing asmoral/legal subjects—and, with that, excision from the human raceimagined as the human rights community.

In this context, the fear that the Jewish Other, whose sacrificial burntoffering founded the community in the first place, has a unique relationshipto the Genocide Thing—some special relationship to its essence that isdenied the rest of the world—is evidently one of contemporary antisemit-ism’s driving passions. This fear supplies unseemly affective support forHolocaust denial, minimization, relativization, and resentment of the Holo-caust. As Zizek asks rhetorically, “Do we not find enjoyment precisely infantasizing about the Other’s enjoyment, in this ambivalent attitude towardit? Do we not obtain satisfaction by means of the very supposition that theOther enjoys in a way inaccessible to us?” (206). In this case, what makesthe Holocaust inaccessible, or seductively forbidden to the antisemite, is theunderstandable sense that it was in fact a total human rights catastrophe inways that even other genocides cannot quite match; albeit, this is debated.

For, what’s not open to debate—“really” unique tragedy or not, and bywhat scientific measure?—is that the Shoah is certainly the one man-madedisaster in history that people argue about in a unique way, debating end-lessly whether or not and how it was or wasn’t unique. This obsessiveinvestment itself makes it unique, therefore, in one very important way atleast: the Holocaust is uniquely discussed for its uniqueness and/or lackthereof. It appears thus to have been more of a genocide than others—even


if this more can be difficult to define uncontroversially, or in a way thatachieves full consensus among rational people of goodwill (never mindantisemites). Should the real “more” turn out to be less, or a lack, the sym-bolic and imaginary “more” would still be formidable. And because point-ing to what in an object is “more than itself” is another way of talking aboutthe Lacanian Thing, we are definitely in the vicinity of human rights dis-course’s Thing-in-itself.

DIALECTICS OF THE NEW ANTISEMITISM

Thus, holocaust envy is a subspecies of just the sort of prurient suppo-sition about the Other’s enjoyment that Zizek famously remarks upon. Ithas this two-fold intersubjective structure: It comes about when, first, Jewsare imagined to enjoy (or “get off on”) their tragedy more fully than otherscan; and, second, when Jewish “theft of enjoyment” (203) is posited as thereason why others can never enjoy fully, can never seem to “get in to”either the Holocaust or their own tragedies sufficiently. Although psychoan-alytic “enjoyment” is sometimes said to consist in “the kind of satisfactionto be garnered from picking at your own festering wound” (Myers 86), thisis a simplification, insofar as it posits enjoyment as something real ratherthan imaginary, something objective about the wound itself rather thanabout the subjective fantasy of the wound’s appearance for the gaze, or inthe eyes of, (the) other(s) (Myers 86).

For my purposes, then, enjoyment is best defined dialectically—as thesatisfaction that the other is imagined to derive from his suffering, trans-lated into the satisfaction that I, as subject-of-enjoyment, in turn derivefrom obsessing about my own inability to enjoy as much/well as thefantasized other. This is an important distinction because, by this definition,what is perturbing about the Jew finally has nothing to do with the Jewhimself, nor even anything to do with the Holocaust, but rather what per-turbs is the Jew’s obscene enjoyment of his festering wound as theantisemitic mind hallucinates it. What Zizek says elsewhere explicitly ofthe old antisemitism is also true—and even more so, thanks to the power ofa globalized human rights discourse—of the new:

What the perpetrators of pogroms find intolerable and rage-provoking,what they react to, is not the immediate reality of Jews, but the image/figure of the “Jew” which circulates and has been constructed in theirtradition. . . . [T]his image overdetermines the way I experience real Jewsthemselves. What makes a real Jew that an antisemite encounters on the


street “intolerable,” what the antisemite tries to destroy when he attacksthe Jew, the true target of his fury, is this fantasmatic dimension.9

This fantasmatic overdetermination of Jew-hatred means that not onlywhat Alain Finkielkraut calls the imaginary Jew, but also the imaginaryJewish State of Israel (!) is the bearer of a projected “Jew-issance” or thesupposed enjoyably painful privilege of being Jewish after the Holocaust.10

With these concepts (and bad puns) in mind, one of the more perplexingthings about the life of Holocaust memory in recent decades—difficult tomake rational sense of otherwise—becomes suddenly less mysterious. Irefer to the observably proliferating phenomenon of those perverse, intense,and destructive rivalries, which, seventy years down the line, remembranceof the Holocaust increasingly stimulates—among those who would at onceidentify with the victims of the worst cruelest, most systematic, thoroughand senseless genocide in history,11 and who, at the same time, seek todisplace those victims. Indeed, this double whammy of empathy/rivalry iswhat one expects from identities based on identification, as Jacques Lacanexplained in his seminal essay “The Mirror Stage.”12 Today we see thisLacanian jubilation of self-discovery in those subjects who ambivalentlyfind themselves held up to the mirror of the Holocaust by human rightsdiscourse.13

9. Cited in Kenneth L. Marcus, “The Definition of Antisemitism” (unpublishedmanuscript). Slavoj Zizek, On Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 66-7. Marcus’simpressively well-informed investigation was helpful as I was revising this paperfor publication.

10. Alain Finkielkraut, The Imaginary Jew (Lincoln: University of NebraskaPress, 1994).

11. For a well-informed discussion of those properties that make the Holocaustunique, see Yehuda Bauer, Rethinking the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale, 2001).“The Holocaust,” writes Bauer, “has assumed the role of universal symbol for allevil because it presents the most extreme form of genocide, because it containselements that are without precedent, because that tragedy was a Jewish one andbecause the Jews—although they are neither better nor worse than others andalthough their sufferings were neither greater nor lesser than those of others—represent one of the sources [along with Athens and Rome] of modern civilization”(270).

12. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function asRevealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” trans. Bruce Fink, Ecrits (New York:Norton, 2006).

13. “Though tightly held by some prop, human or artificial,” Lacan writes of theyoung child entering the mirror stage, she or he “overcomes [feelings of helpless-ness] in a flutter of jubilant activity,” testing even “the constraints of his prop [themother/Other] in order to adopt a slightly leaning-forward position and take aninstantaneous view of the image in order to fix it in his mind” (Ecrits 76).


Victims everywhere, from housewives under patriarchy to BosnianMuslims to members of the Audubon Society,14 ask to identify/be identifiedwith/as Jews, in order to take their place as the “real” Jews—the real vic-tims, the victims whose suffering matters, about whom one properly shouldcare. As Robert Meister states in his extraordinary study, After Evil: APolitics of Human Rights:

The global politics of human rights after Auschwitz is still about theJews. Today oppressed groups can qualify themselves as bearers ofhuman rights by recognizing what happened to Jews during the Holo-caust and asserting that another holocaust might happen to them. Theyare often said to disqualify themselves as bearers of human rights bydenying the Holocaust and declaring themselves enemies of the Jews.15

But this recognition and identification, the mandatory price of admis-sion to today’s global culture of human rights, as Meister clearly sees, doesnot yield entirely wholesome results in every case, and can by no means berelied upon to redound to either Jews’ or Israel’s benefit over time. Giventhe complex motivations of human beings, the vicissitudes of moral psy-chology, and the cynical ways in which the rhetoric of human rights is oftendeployed in the service of a thinly veiled will-to-power—the sweet recogni-tion that Meister adverts to can and frequently does in fact turn sour, givingway to scandalized condemnation. This is particularly so among aggrievedgroups who feel themselves unrecognized or under-recognized when it’stheir turn to be the Jews. This is even more the case when the under-recognizers are said to be, of all people, the Jews themselves—who shouldknow better, given their access to a surplus genocide-jouissance.

As the particular standard bearers for what it universally means to beoppressed, in other words, post-Holocaust Jewry’s privileged symbolicposition opens it to charges that—even or especially in a secular age thatsees itself as transcending the old antisemitism—could only be leveled atJews. The new antisemitism thus lays down one of its platform planks,carved out of the sturdy cedar of resentment against Jews per se for failingto learn the lessons of the Holocaust that they, of all people, should havelearned best but somehow didn’t—or, more diabolically still, which theylearned quite well but refuse to apply to others, holding on to their delicious

14. Alvin H. Rosenfeld documents thoroughly the spread of both trivial and not-so-trivial analogies to the Holocaust in his important book, The End of the Holo-caust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2011.

15. Robert Meister, After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights (New York: Colum-bia University Press, 2010), 175. Subsequent references to this edition appear citedin the text.


Jew-issance for themselves. Meister again puts it brilliantly, with referencein particular to Palestinian Holocaust envy (my term, not his):

In a world that has learned to feel good about itself by feeling bad aboutthe Jews, one can take special umbrage at Jews who refuse to apply theHolocaust’s lessons to their own treatment of Palestinians. These Jewsare to be criticized for thinking that they are the only real Jews, and thatthe Holocaust confers special privilege on actions they take to protectthemselves from those who, as enemies of the Jews, become the moralequivalent of Nazis who would bring about the Holocaust again. Thisattitude has become a seemingly new offense that Jews, and Jews alone,can commit now that their victimary identity has been universalized.(175-176; my emphasis)

Put another way: who are the literal Jews, after World War II, to say thatthey are the Jews when everyone’s a metaphorical Jew nowadays—in theage of never again, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of HumanRights, and its mandate to stop genocide anywhere and everywhere acrossthe globe?

In a democratic age that abhors inherent distinctions of rank, even as itpositively valorizes everyone’s “victimary identity,” encouraging people tosee themselves as constitutively injured subjects and rewarding them fordoing so—in such a moral universe, is not everyone entitled to an equalshare of, or in, suffering, as the essence of subjectivity? “Picking at yourown festering wound” is something we’re all entitled (commanded) to donowadays, by the logic of multicultural political correctness. To “be” a mul-ticultural subject is to be the bearer of just such a wound. So why then dothe Jews do it (pick at theirs) more? Can they be allowed to get away withit? They do it too much, and so the rest of us can’t get to do it enough as aresult. Moreover, their wound, if it was ever as bad as they say, is surelyhealed by now and a thing of the past. While ours yet bleeds. . . . So, ineffect, operate the gears of the new antisemitic unconscious. Perhaps thisalso helps explain why Jews are not generally included on the syllabus as asubculture, when the topic is ostensibly ethnicity-based multiculturalism onAmerican campuses. That, and the fact that they are now successful as agroup—a circumstance leaving Jews simultaneously both too wounded andnot wounded enough for multiculturalism’s egalitarian freemasonry of theinjured and in-need-of-affirmative-action.

DISTRIBUTIVE INJUSTICE

Applied to genocide, the logic of affirmative action means that every-one is entitled to a piece of the Holocaust, understood as the universal sym-


bol of Radical Evil—an evil taken to operate on at least the principle ofequality-of-opportunity if not a more egalitarian, Rawlsian, rough equality-of-results16—Although it is Jews and “Jews alone,” as Meister notes, whoare in a position to be regarded as capable of missing this fact, uniquelytempted as they are to seek to monopolize for themselves the properlyshared significance of the defining event of the 20th century. Moreover, theJewish State and the Jewish State alone can be—is—accused of instru-mentalizing the ultimate example of suffering to serve its national self-interest. Israeli philosopher Elhanan Yakira thus meticulously dissects themyth of an Israeli Shoah chauvinism in his recent book, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust.

In ways cognate with and supportive of my argument—though heeschews my sort of “deep” analysis of motivations, which he says franklydon’t interest him—Yakira focuses on the cadre of post-Zionist academicsinside Israel, identifying there what he calls an “opprobrium community” ortight-knit club of hyper-intellectuals who cite each other’s books, all pas-sionately dedicated to trashing Israel from the inside. In my view, thiskvetchers network can usefully be understood as another manifestation ofwhat American sociology conceptualized in the 1970s more broadly as “theadversary culture of the intellectuals”—a product of comfortable bourgeoissociety’s tendency to give rise to an influential segment of alienatedpseudo-bohemians that rejects the culture in total and in principle (asopposed to the liberal voicing of more modest criticisms aimed at reform).In Israel today, this apparently means rejecting Zionism (the idea of a Jew-ish and democratic state) by first, claiming falsely that Israel’s only-eversource of legitimacy flowed from being the alternative to the Holocaust,and second, insisting that it forfeited this passkey to the club of nations bymismanaging its privileged status as the “survivor” state, almost from thestart—particularly if one follows Hannah Arendt’s influential condemna-tion of the Eichmann trial as less the prosecution of a mass-murdering fiendthan a poor piece of pedagogy.17

16. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press),1971. In Rawls’s terms—translated into the present discussion in a way I cannotimagine he would approve—in an unequal distribution of misery, “privileged” vic-tims are entitled to relatively more suffering than “underprivileged” ones only if thesurplus jouissance of the former helps supply, in absolute terms, more enjoymentof suffering for the latter. Otherwise, it needs to be redistributed.

17. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil(New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). The popularity to this day of this befuddledtext—by far the worst thing written by one of the great minds of the 20th century—is a mystery for sociology, or psychoanalysis, to explain.


The problem once again is that the Jews and the Jews alone thinkthey’re the real Jews—when today in fact (so say the members of theopprobrium community) the Jews themselves behave more like Nazis andthe Palestinians, therefore, have become in effect the Jews that matter. Theprevalence of such grotesque analogies leads Yakira to protest what he callsforthrightly “the systematic, simplistic, tendentious, and utterly baselessway the Holocaust is used to lambaste Israel.” What’s more, discerningcontinuities between post-Zionist uses of the Holocaust and outright Holo-caust denial—the latter claiming of course that Jews were never the realvictims of the Nazis in the first place, but have always opportunisticallyexaggerated their suffering to gain leverage—Yakira writes:

The way the Holocaust figures in quite a number of essays, articles andbooks written in Hebrew, the way it is used as a central tenet in scathingcriticisms of Israel’s conduct in the occupied territories or of the moraland historical justification given for the establishment of a Jewish state—all this reflects a perversion quite similar, if not identical, to that of whichHolocaust denial . . . is the most extreme symptom.18

And symptom—as I have suggested—is the right word here, as we aredealing with a kind of cultural pathology, or “perversion.” Without realiz-ing it, Yakira, in his devastating deconstruction of the post-Zionists, has notonly revealed the conscious intentions of those he criticizes, but providesthe empirical basis for the psychoanalysis of this strange movement as well.For what deniers and the opprobrium community have in common, as thephilosopher’s psychoanalytically tinged vocabulary hints, is a symptomindeed, in the precise sense of a libidinal investment in the perturbing Thingthat embodies enjoyment. Symptoms, by definition, are what the subjectperversely enjoys suffering from. It appears that, just as Woody Allen oncejoked, “I’m the only man ever diagnosed with penis envy,” the fact that thepost-Zionists whom Yakira disputes with are Israeli Jews does not preventthem from feeling a vicarious Holocaustneid on the part of “castrated”others.

THE HOLOCAUST-ENVY INDUSTRY

Holocaust envy, in sum, is that slimy libidinal ooze that palpably coatsHolocaust relativization and Holocaust resentment, as well as outright Hol-ocaust denial. Moreover, with respect to the growing problem of “campusantisemitism” in particular, the obsessively invested symptom of post-Holo-

18. Elhanan Yakira, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2010), 86.


caust post-Zionism is also part of the basis of postcolonial theory as anacademic subdiscipline. For how can a theory based on epochal grievancefail to envy—narcissistically identify and compete with, seek to emulateand displace—Jewish sufferers as the bearers of a surplus Jew-issance?Diaspora is a ubiquitous term in postcolonial theory, for example. And asthe Jews have their capital-H Holocaust, so too shall the Palestinians havetheir capital-N Nakba. From the postcolonial point of view, therefore, it isespecially easy to see that the Palestinians are now the Jews, and the Jews,by becoming Israelis, have become (worse than) Nazis—a claim that goesback to the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism (laterrevoked, in 1991), and before that to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of1967, and before that even to the founding of the State of Israel.19 Thus,while the use and abuse of such repugnant rhetoric appears to be on theincrease today, in fact the taboo analogy between Zionists and Nazis provedan irresistible frisson for some from the moment it became conceivable, andhas not in fact depended on the Palestinians’ weakness or Israel’s growingmight by comparison. Indeed, it is a Hitlerian invention—already a symp-tom/sinthome of the old-fashioned antisemitism, it turns out—from thestart. As is well known, Hitler himself projected blame for starting WorldWar II onto the Jews—famously displacing Nazism’s plans for world domi-nation onto its victims.

This same obscene equation of antisemite and Jew—so symptomaticof a perverse libidinal investment—is made by postcolonial theory, preva-lent on today’s university campuses, in one of its founding gestures. Indeed,according to the godfather of postcolonial theory, Edward Said, in his semi-nal 1978 text Orientalism, post-Holocaust antisemitism is best understoodas the prejudice that Arabs [sic] suffer from at the hands of Jews [sic]. Atthe end of World War II, Said explains to his followers:

The transference of a popular antisemitic animus from a Jewish to anArab target was made smoothly, since the figure was essentially thesame. . . . Thus the Arab is conceived of now as a shadow that dogs theJew. In that shadow—because Arabs and Jews are Oriental Semites—canbe placed whatever traditional, latent mistrust a Westerner feels towardsthe Oriental. For the Jew of pre-Nazi Europe has bifurcated: what wehave now is a Jewish hero, constructed out of a reconstructed cult of theadventurer-pioneer-Orientalist [ . . . ] and his creeping, mysteriously fear-some shadow, the Arab Oriental.20

19. Norman Podhoretz, “The Abandonment of Israel,” Commentary (July1976): 23-31.

20. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978), 286; my emphasis.


So it appears, just as Meister says, that “today oppressed groups . . . qualifythemselves as bearers of human rights by recognizing what happened toJews during the Holocaust and asserting that another holocaust might [havealready!] happen[ed] to them,” preferably at the hands of the survivors ofthe first Holocaust and their descendants. As Alvin Rosenfeld powerfullydocuments in The End of the Holocaust, the practice of analogizing theHolocaust promiscuously has become widespread—with not only Palestini-ans suffering from “genocide” (while increasing in population), but alsoNative Americans, African Americans, gays and lesbians, AIDS victims,and fetuses—all suffering from their own holocausts.

When there is no denying the reality of far too much human misery,the sad point that has unfortunately to be made is that “where there is a‘holocaust’ there must be a Hitler.” According to the same logic as that bywhich victims everywhere become metaphorical Jews, oppressors acrosstime and space become, in a reductio ad Hitlerum, not just gifted evil-doersin their own right, but morph inevitably into virtual Nazis. As Pascal Bruck-ner observes:

Nazism is supposed to have begun on the day that the white man,whether Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch, set foot on the shores of Africa orAmerica, sowing death, chaos, and destruction. It is as if the Third Reichhad literally swallowed, one after the other, the centuries that preceded it,this becoming the key to violent or atrocious phenomena that occurredseveral centuries earlier. . . . People find it hard to realize that barbarity isplural, that not all massacres are genocides, that not all genocides resem-ble each other, that there are degrees and diversity of horror as well.21

What Bruckner colorfully calls Hitlerizing history applies not only to thepast, however. And this matters greatly. For the present (and future?) is alsoswallowed up and Hitlerized when, as Rosenfeld explains—focusing on theAmerican reception of the Holocaust in light of the identity politics that hasbeen so characteristic of the last thirty years on campus:

This tendency to relativize and universalize the Holocaust has been aprominent part of the American reception of Holocaust representationsfrom the start. It is strong today and seems to be growing, especiallywithin those segments of American culture that are intent on developing apolitics of identity based on victim status and the grievances that comewith such status. (69; my emphasis)

21. Pascal Bruckner, The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 125-126.


The politics of identity, in other words, are so often anti-Jewish becausethey are so saturated in Holocaust envy.

ANTISEMITIC AGALMA—CAMPUS CHRISTOLOGY

By way of conclusion, it seems important to note the (even) big(ger)picture. As Rene Girard points out, we live today in the Age of the Victim:

Our society is the most preoccupied with victims of any that ever was.Even if it is insincere, a big show, the phenomenon has no precedent. Nohistorical period, no society we know, has ever spoken of victims as wedo. We can detect in the recent past the beginnings of the contemporaryattitude, but every day new records are broken. We are all actors as wellas witnesses in a great anthropological first.22

Under such novel conditions, the Holocaust as “universalized” revela-tion becomes not so much a crime perpetrated by some against others, but a“new Golgotha,” as Bruckner sees it, “the gold standard of suffering” (113).In the Christological appropriation of history, the gassed Jew, like the cruci-fied one, is no longer simply a Jew—and yet, tragically, shamefully, soexquisitely disappointingly once again, it is the Jews themselves (of all peo-ple) who fail to get the message. Not only that, but in some of the moreaggressive post-Zionist scholarship—such as that of Idith Zertal, who fol-lows in the footsteps of Arendt to focus on the role of Jewish councils insupposedly helping to make the Holocaust more efficient—it is once againthe Jews themselves who murdered Christ (the gassed, shot, and starvedmillions) or at least handed him over to the Romans.23 In the numismaticreading (with regard to the metaphor of the “gold standard”): Who are theJews to hoard their imaginary shekels, thus threatening to destroy an other-wise booming symbolic economy of human rights, which now more thanever, after the end of the Cold War (not to say the End of History), dependsupon the smooth convertability of every kind of depoliticized injustice (viz.human rights violation) into every other kind?

So, the new antisemitism draws strength from the old, after all, itseems, as fascination with these perennial tropes would indicate—even as itrevitalizes itself by “enjoying” genocide symptomatically, in new post-Zionist and postcolonial modalities that would have been impossible pre- orpost-Holocaust (if I may so inelegantly put it). It all points to a denial that a

22. Rene Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Press,2006), 161.

23. Idith Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2005).


specifically Jewish genocide can also be a democratic one, in the sense of ashared object of veneration that nonetheless concerns a particular group ofpeople in a special way. Instead, “Auschwitz has become a monstrousobject of covetous lust,” as Bruckner says, “[w]hence the frenzied effort togain admission to this very closed club and the desire to dislodge those whoare already in it” (114; emphasis added). Or, as Alain Finkielkraut says,“The model you wish to resemble becomes the rival you must supplant inorder to feel alive yourself [to extract your jouissance]. The metaphoricalprinciple (be like the Jews) leads to the violence of this murderous princi-ple: It’s us or them.”24 And the all-too-literal—not only metaphorical—conclusion? If there cannot be a Jewish and democratic genocide, then therecan/need be no Jewish and democratic state—it’s one or the other, us orthem. Forgetting that barbarity is plural—as are nationalities—the newantisemitism winds up sounding much like the old, only more so.

What is not to be underestimated, however, is the virulence of contem-porary neo-antisemitism’s Jew-issance-ridden manifestations in the form ofa metastasizing “Holocaust envy.” If there is a long-term menace to the wayIsrael’s miraculously “imagined community” is imagined—and, with G-d’shelp, continues to be realized—this is part of it.25 For, as Edward Alexandersaid in his courageous 1994 book, The Holocaust and the War of Ideas:

The campaign to steal the Holocaust from its Jewish victims expresses adeep-seated wish to transform the Nazi murder of the Jews, a crime ofterrifying clarity and distinctness, into a blurred, amorphous agony, anindeterminate part of man’s inhumanity to man. It subserves the designsof those who wish to release the nations of the West from whatever slightburden of guilt they may still bear for what they allowed or helped Hitlerto do to the Jews of Europe, and so remove whatever impediments ofconscience may yet stand in the way of the anti-Israel crusade. (206)

In keeping with Alexander’s foreboding, my concern is that in order to“steal” the Holocaust from the Jews in good conscience, and so help releasethe brakes on a disgustingly moralized campaign against Israel as uniquely“illegitimate” among all the nations because of its “impure” founding, theanti-Zionist antisemite first fantasizes the treasure (in Lacanese, “agalma”)of the Holocaust’s significance as primordially stolen from innocent man-kind as a whole—defiled luxuriantly by corrupt Jewish thieves to begin

24. Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question ofGenocide (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 113.

25. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (New York: Verso, 1983), citedin Zertal, Israel’s Holocaust.


with. From such preternatural “thieves,” naturally, one has every right tosteal it back in return—while enjoying doing so.

*Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr. is a research fellow in Israel studies at Brandeis Univer-sity, and assistant professor of English at Northern Michigan University. His latestbook (co-authored with Catherine Carlstroem and Forrest G. Robinson) is TheJester and the Sages: Mark Twain in Conversation with Nietzsche, Freud and Marx(Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2011). Contact: [email protected].

REFERENCES

Alexander, Edward. 1994. The Holocaust and the War of Ideas. New Brunswick,NJ: Transaction.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.Bruckner, Pascal. 2010. The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Finkielkraut, Alain. 1994. The Imaginary Jew. Lincoln, NE: University of

Nebraska Press.———. 1998. The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide.

Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.Girard, Rene. 2006. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Mary Knoll, NY: Orbis Press.Lacan, Jacques, Bruce Fink trans. 2006. Ecrits. New York: Norton.Levy, Bernard-Henri. 2008. Left in Dark Times. New York: Random House.Marcus, Kenneth L. “The Definition of Antisemitism.” Unpublished manuscript.Meister, Robert. 2010. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights. New York:

Columbia University Press.Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Zizek. New York: Routledge.Podhoretz, Norman. 1976. “The Abandonment of Israel.” Commentary (July): 23-

31.Rosenfeld, Alvin. 2011. The End of the Holocaust. Bloomington: University of

Indiana Press, 2011.Said, Edward. 1978. Orientalism. New York: Vintage.Yakira, Elhanan. 2010. Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.Zertal, Idith. 2005. Israel’s Holocaust and the Politics of Nationhood. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.Zizek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of

Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press.———. 2008. On Violence. New York: Picador.

Mental Models of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Wilhelm Kempf*

We need to reconstruct mental models according to which the partici-pants make their own meaning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as theytake a stance. Starting from the perspective that mental models have bothemotional and cognitive components, this paper introduces a question-naire designed to measure these components and a two-step process ofdata analysis with which the mental models can be reconstructed. Theresults of a pilot study using German and Austrian participants supportthe validity of this methodological approach. As in previous research, theresults are also consistent with the assumptions that: (1) the developmentof an interpretive frame requires a certain minimum of knowledge and/orfamiliarity with the issues people are trying to understand; and (2) eventhose who adopt a war frame to interpret conflict believe in peace as theultimate goal of war.

Key Words: Israel, Palestinian, War, Empirical

Since the Gaza war of December 27, 2008, criticism of Israeli policyhas been on the rise throughout the Western world. The peace movement inIsrael and within Jewish communities worldwide appreciates this develop-ment, and many of its members even regard it as justifying their position.On the other hand, however, there are Jews inside and outside of Israel whofear that the increasing criticism of Israeli policy might be linked with anew wave of antisemitism. Many Germans and Austrians who have learnedthe lessons of their history also share this fear.

Already, Bergmann and Erb (1991a, 1991b) have pointed out that ataboo against antisemitic utterances in public discourse can encourage usingcriticism of Israel as a code for expressing antisemitic attitudes. The tabooon antisemitic utterances also appears to be weakening. Not only has thetone of criticism become sharper since the Gaza war, but also some personsand groups have openly taken sides against Israel, and expressions from therepertoire of secondary antisemitism such as “Holocaust bonus” have foundtheir way into political discourse. In reaction to the Israeli military opera-tion against the Gaza aid convoy on May 31, 2010, there was a deluge ofantisemitic comments on the Internet. In the social networks, Twitter andFacebook, we can find examples of the entire antisemitic repertoire, includ-ing utterances that have nothing to do with objective criticism of Israel—comments like:

507


• “Lock all the Jews in gas chambers and gas them!!! My idol is AdolfHITLER” (Der Standard, January 6, 2010).

• “TOO BAD THAT ADOLF HITLER DID NOT KILL ALL THEJEWS” (Spiegel Online, April 6, 2010).

• “SHIT JEWS SIEG HEILLLLL” (Spiegel Online, April 6, 2010).Such vicious antisemitic utterances are not only posted in the Internet

anonymously; often, the authors also give their real names and photos.As disturbing as this development undoubtedly is, it would neverthe-

less be wrong to automatically regard any criticism of Israel as motivatedby antisemitism. Criticism of Israeli policy can be due to a multitude offactors ranging from concern for the future of Israel via partisanship for thePalestinians to hatred of Jews. And insofar as antisemitic attitudes play arole, they may either stand at the very beginning of Israel criticism (i.e.,ersatz communication), or they may come at the end of a process in whichcriticism of Israel is transformed into making Israel the enemy and finallytwisted into antisemitism.

Previously, however, little was known about the relationship ofantisemitism and attitudes critical of Israel. The available studies havemethodical weaknesses, and their results are contradictory.

Using 2004 survey data from the Anti-Defamation League, Kaplan andSmall (2006) conclude that antisemitic attitudes increase with growingacceptance of anti-Israeli statements. Yet, correlation studies are only to alimited extent conclusive. Participants who unconditionally support Israelipolicy will hardly be burdened with long-held antisemitic attitudes, anddyed-in-the-wool antisemites will probably not be sympathetic to Israelipolicy; already, these two extreme groups are causing a moderate correla-tion between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Still, this correlation, aswith other correlation studies (Baum, 2009; Cohen, Jussim, Harber, andBhasin, 2009), says little regarding the extent that antisemitism motivatescriticism of Israel.

A study by Heyder, Iser, and Schmidt (2005), on the other hand, givesthe impression that attitudes critical of Israel are not motivated byantisemitism. While about three-quarters of all Germans in all educationalgroups were found to harbor critical attitudes toward Israeli Palestinian pol-icy, antisemitic attitudes were inversely proportional to the educationallevels of study participants.

A Swiss study that differentiates between cognitive attitudes and situa-tional emotions toward Israel on the one side, and attitudes hostile to Jewson the other, also concludes that anti-Israeli attitudes are “to be viewed asan independent phenomenon and evaluated independently of actualantisemitism” (GfS 2007, 48).

2011] MENTAL MODELS OF THE ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT 509

Bergmann’s analyses (2008, 493) likewise point in this direction. Hehas compiled various empirical findings indicating that attitudes toward theMiddle East conflict are strongly politically steered and not simple expres-sions of sympathy or antipathy toward Jews and Palestinians. Thus, amongother things, Bergmann includes a 1991 Emnid study showing that sympa-thy for the Palestinians correlates positively with sympathy for the Arabside, but has no influence on sympathy for the Jews in Israel. To the con-trary: Anyone who lacks sympathy for the Jews in Israel has an above-average tendency to lack sympathy for the Palestinians, and anyone whosympathizes with the Israelis also tends to sympathize with the Palestinians.

A cluster analysis by Frindte, Wammetsberger, and Wettig (2005a,2005b), finally, suggests that there are two different types of criticism ofIsrael: (1) criticism of Israel motivated by antisemitism and (2) criticism ofIsrael independent of antisemitic prejudices.

Kempf (2010) reaches a similar conclusion on the basis of a secondaryanalysis of data from Petzold (2004). Latent-class-analysis of the data iden-tified seven classes of participants who display typical response patterns:one class supportive of Israel (typical of 18.2% of all participants), twoclasses that refrain from criticizing Israel (18.97%), and four classes that arecritical of Israel (63.21%).

In addition, among those who criticized Israel, the majority (38.23% ofall participants) appears to be free of antisemitic tendencies, criticizingIsrael in a rather moderate way and not siding with the Palestinians. Therest of the Israel critics (27.65% of all participants) positioned themselveson the side of the Palestinians, and their criticism of Israel did not refrainfrom encouraging antisemitic sentiments.

If we want to understand what sources give rise to criticism of Israelipolicies toward Palestine, we must study other motivations besidesantisemitism—e.g., pacifistic vs. bellicose attitudes, and the human rightsorientation of the participants as well. Above all, we must not forget that theMiddle East conflict is precisely not just a conflict between Jews and non-Jews; it is also a conflict that as such is conditioned by the same psycholog-ical framework as other conflicts.

Of great importance in this connection is the distinction going back toDeutsch (1973), between constructive and destructive conflicts. Whether aconflict can be constructively settled or whether it will take a destructivecourse depends essentially on whether the conflict parties conceptualize theconflict as a cooperative (win-win model) or competitive (win-lose model)process. According to Deutsch, competitive misperceptions represent themotor of conflict escalation, which in cases of long-term (intractable) con-flicts ultimately harden into societal beliefs (Bar-Tal, 1998). These beliefsform an essential component of the psychic infrastructure that enables the


members of a society to endure the burdens of war. They include, amongothers, the justness of one’s cause, one’s victim status, the illegitimacy ofthe enemy’s cause, the defense of personal and national security through apolicy of strength, and—last but not least—the belief in peace as the ulti-mate goal of war.

According to Deutsch, a process of competitive misinterpretationbegins with the conflict parties’ divergence of perspectives. Due to theresulting asymmetry of trust and suspicion, the level of conflict ratchets upso that the conflict parties become less and less willing to (also) view theopponents’ actions from their perspective. Accordingly, the conflict partiesbegin to lose the ability to receive information that could correct their preju-dicial interpretations of the opponent’s actions and tend to regard their ownaims and actions as more appropriate and justifiable than those of theopposing side.

Even in cooperative conflicts, however, characteristic forms of misun-derstanding and misjudgment arise. Cooperation tends to weaken the per-ception of contradictions and to strengthen the partners’ goodwill.According to Deutsch, these typical changes have the effect of containingconflict and making escalation less likely, but they also pose the danger thatsome conflict issues may be overlooked, or that the conflict parties mayengage in “premature cooperation.”

The members of a society directly affected by a conflict are not theonly ones who develop such convictions. Outsiders trying to make sense ofa conflict in which they are not themselves engaged will also interpret iteither in the sense of a win-win model (peace frame) or of a win-lose model(war frame) (ASPR, 2003). How a person positions himself toward a con-flict—which side he takes, e.g., in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—thusdepends essentially on the mental model he forms of the conflict.

The concept of mental models that we thereby adopt originally stemsfrom cognitive psychology, where it was first used by the Scottish psychol-ogist Kenneth Craik in his book The Nature of Explanation (1943). Hewrites therein about how people construct models of reality in their mindsthat they use to derive conclusions, give explanations, and predict events.According to van Dijk and Kintsch (1983), a mental model is “a dynamicmental representation of a situation, an event or an object.” It serves as acognitive-emotional interpretive frame (Kempf, 2008), which organizes theprocessing and organization of incoming information and endows it withmeaning.

Mental models have both an emotional and a cognitive component. Inthe case of conflict, the emotional component is formed by (at least) twofactors: (1) concern about the conflict, and (2) the emotional ambivalence ofits consequences. The cognitive component is constituted by the frame


according to which the conflict is interpreted and ranges from a peace frameto a war frame and from a neutral frame to a partisan one. Only when wehave reconstructed the participants’ mental models can we relate them toantisemitic attitudes and/or to the media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinianconflict and investigate whether what makes people critical of Israel is thereported facts themselves, or instead the specific way these facts are framedby the media.

The present paper discusses a questionnaire that we designed to help inreconstructing mental models and, in addition, presents the results of a pilotstudy in which we tested it.

METHOD

To assess participants’ mental models, we designed three separatescales and applied a two-step Latent-Class-Analysis procedure. In this way,we identified typical response patterns that give us clues as to the partici-pants’ mental models of conflict.

Emotional closeness to a conflict refers to the participants’ familiaritywith and concern about the conflict, and was assessed by a total of nineitems, as shown in Table 1.

TABLE 1: ASSESSMENT OF THE PARTICIPANTS’ CONCERNMENT

FOR THE CONFLICT

emo01: How would you judge your knowledge of the Israeli-PalestinianKnowledge conflict?

Concernment emo02: How deeply does the conflict affect you?

Partisanship emo03: Which side do you feel more attached to?

Experience emo04: Have you ever been in Israel? emo05: Have you ever been in thePalestinian territories?

Personal contact emo06: Have you ever had personal emo07: Have you ever had personalcontact with Israelis? contact with Palestinians?

Relatedness emo08: Do you have Israeli friends, emo09: Do you have Palestinianacquaintances or relatives? friends, acquaintances or relatives?

Emotional ambivalence refers to the fact that the frames according towhich people interpret conflict not only represent cognitive patterns, butalso have emotional dimensions—and indeed in an ambivalent way, forboth the war and the peace frames promise security, yet simultaneouslythey also create insecurity (Kempf, 2010).


The war frame offers security, because familiar, tried-and-true actionpatterns can be continued, but it also creates insecurity, because it poses thethreat of continued antagonism and violence.

The peace frame also offers security, because it promises an end toviolence, but at the same time it creates insecurity, because new behavioralpatterns must be tried whose efficacy is still uncertain.

In our present research, the emotional ambivalence of the frames wasassessed by eight items, which are shown in Table 2.

TABLE 2: ASSESSMENT OF THE PARTICIPANTS’ EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE

For Israelis For Palestinians

War frame Offers security ambi01i: With firm resolve and ambi01p: Through persistentmilitary strength, Israel’s exis- armed resistance, a Palestiniantence can be secured in the state can be brought about bylong term force

Creates threat ambi02i: As long as Israel tries ambi02p: If the Palestinianto control the conflict by mili- leadership does not prevent thetary means (alone), its popula- use of force, the Palestinianstion will be exposed to the will not be allowed to foundconstant threat of Palestinian their own stateviolence

Peace frame Offers security ambi03i: The complete return ambi03p: A little more flexibil-of the occupied territories ity would make it possible forwould make it possible for the Palestinians to have a last-Israel to have an enduring ing peace with Israelpeace with the Palestinians

Creates threat ambi04i: Returning to the bor- ambi04p: A compromise withders of 1967 would represent a Israel would mean selling outgreat security risk for Israel Palestinian interests

Participants responded to the items on a 5-point Likert scale: “disagreecompletely—rather disagree—neither disagree nor agree—rather agree—agree completely,” with “don’t know” as an additional response category.

Positioning to the conflict: No less ambivalent is how people in Germany orAustria position themselves in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict(Kempf, 2010). The World War II lesson of “never again fascism, neveragain war” implies a tendency toward the peace frame (never again war). Itis ambivalent, however, in regard to the human rights question (never againfascism), which can be interpreted in two ways:

1. Support for the victims of National Socialism, which implies a ten-dency toward unconditional solidarity with Israeli policy and aweakening of the peace frame. This can go so far that it turns into a


war frame: never again fascism, therefore war, as was the case (inpart) in the Gulf War discourse in 1990-91 (Kempf, 1994).

2. Support for human rights worldwide, which implies a tendency torefrain from endorsing at least some aspects of Israeli policy andincludes expressing solidarity with the Israeli peace movement andat least a certain degree of empathy with the Palestinian side.

Although this at first means a strengthening of the peace frame, it thencan create the danger of shifting to a war frame and taking sides with thePalestinians.

With regard to positioning toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wecan thus identify various positioning patterns that result from the twodimensions of war frame vs. peace frame and from taking sides with eitherof the two parties (Table 3).

TABLE 3: PATTERNS OF POSITIONING TOWARD THE

ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

Pro-Israel Neutral Pro-Palestine

War frame Uncritical support of Criticism of Israeli policy,Israeli policy, delegitima- delegitimation of thetion of the Palestinians, Israelis, and justificationand justification of Israeli of Palestinian violenceviolence

Peace frame Criticism of both sides’ Criticism of both sides’ Criticism of both sides’policies, accentuation of policies, accentuation of policies, accentuation ofthe vital needs of the the vital needs of both the vital needs of theIsraelis, and condemna- societies, and condemna- Palestinians, and condem-tion of violence on both tion of violence on both nation of violence on bothsides sides sides

In order to reconstruct the participants’ positioning patterns, wedesigned a questionnaire consisting of 14 statements, shown in Table 4, towhich the participants responded on the same 5-point Likert scale asdescribed above.

In order to reconstruct the participants’ mental models, a two-stepLatent-Class-Analysis (LCA) was applied, and the set of classes that pro-vide an optimal description of the data was determined according toAkaike’s (1987) information criterion (AIC).

As a first step, we identified (latent) classes of typical response pat-terns for each of the three scales: “emotional closeness,” “emotional ambiv-alence,” and “positioning to the conflict.”


TABLE 4: ASSESSMENT OF THE PARTICIPANTS’ POSITIONING

TO THE CONFLICT

Pro Israeli Pro Palestinian

Endorsement of npeace01: A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can only be foundpeace through negotiation.

Accentuation of npeace03: A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict must take account ofvital needs the necessities of life of both populations.

ipeace01: All the participants should ppeace01: All the participants shouldwork for the Israelis to be able to work for the Palestinians to be ablelook forward to a peaceful future to lead a peaceful, self-determinedfree of fear. life.

Refutation of a iwar01: The Palestinian leadership pwar01: The Israeli government canpeaceful conflict can only be made to recognize Israel only be forced to make concessionsresolution by force of arms. by using military force.

Criticism of oppo- iwar02: The Palestinian leadership is pwar02: Israel is intransigent andnent’s policy not ready to make compromises and tries to maintain the existing condi-

tries to impose its maximum aims tions by the use of force.without regard to losses.

Delegitimation of iwar03: The goal of the Palestinian pwar03: The aim of the Israeli pol-the opponent leadership is the destruction of Israel. icy is the continued oppression and

disenfranchisement of the Palestini-ans.

Legitimation of iwar04: The Israelis are conducting a pwar04: The Palestinians are con-own side’s war- legitimate defensive war against Pal- ducting a legitimate war of liberationfare estinian terrorism. against the Israeli occupation.

Condemnation of iwar05: The Palestinian terror pwar05: Israel’s military operationsopponent’s vio- attacks against the Israeli population against the Palestinians are exorbi-lence can be justified by nothing. tant and unjustified.

In these analyses, missing data and “don’t know” responses weretreated as separate response categories of their own. In the subsequent com-putation of mean judgments within the groups, on the other hand, they wererecoded as “neither disagree nor agree.”

In a second step, the participants’ mental models were identified bymeans of a second-order LCA in which we entered the participants’ classmemberships as variables.

Before the background of German and Austrian postwar history (“les-sons of World War II”), we can expect that the majority of the participantswill tend to be peace-oriented (Hypothesis 1). To be able to position them-selves in regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, however, they need aminimum of familiarity with the conflict (Hypothesis 2). Thereby, it will bepossible to find not only pro-Israeli, but also neutral and pro-Palestinianpeace frames (Hypothesis 3). The more familiar the participants are with theconflict, the stronger the pressure will be for them to take a position in favorof one side or the other (Hypothesis 4).


Cooperative misperception (Deutsch, 1973) favors overlooking notonly the ambivalence of the peace frame, but also that of the war frame andperceiving for both sides only the negative aspects of war and the positiveaspects of peace (Hypothesis 5).

The more familiar the participants are with the conflict and thestronger the positioning pressure, the more likely it is that the participantswill shift to a war frame (Hypothesis 6). A minority of the participants willtherefore interpret the conflict either in the sense of a pro-Israeli or a pro-Palestinian war frame (Hypothesis 7).

Due to a belief in peace as the highest aim of the war (Bar-Tal, 1998),however, even participants who interpret the conflict in the sense of a warframe will agree with the demand for a negotiated settlement (Hypothesis 8)that takes into account the necessities of life of both populations in equalmeasure (Hypothesis 9). We expect that this tendency will increase instrength as the radicalism of the war frame increases (Hypothesis 10). Themore the participants position themselves in favor of one side, the morethey will emphasize this side’s necessities of life as opposed to those of theopposing side (Hypothesis 11).

SAMPLE

Data collection took place about a year after the Gaza war, from thestart of November 2009 until February 2010. In all, 68.5% of the data wascollected in Germany and 31.5% in Austria. The total number of partici-pants in the study was N = 553. The age of the participants ranged from 17to 63 (M = 22.73; SD = 5.245); 64.7% were female, and 35.3% were male.The great majority of the participants were students: 6.9% had completedjob training, 9.9% had completed a vocational-technical school, 11.0% hada university degree, and 0.9% had a PhD. In terms of religion, 47.6% wereCatholic, 25.5% Protestant, 1.4% Muslim, and 0.7% were Jewish; 4.4%belonged to another (mainly Christian1) religion, and 20.4% claimed to benon-religious. Of the participants, 12.8% had a background in migration,whereby about a third of the migrants came from the former Soviet Union.

RESULTS

An LCA of the participants’ emotional closeness to the conflict identi-fied four classes (Figure 1), which are clearly ordered with respect to theparticipants’ emotional closeness: EmoClass 3 (20.2% of all participants):very low; EmoClass 1 (40.5%): low; EmoClass 2 (33.8%): moderate, and

1. The only exceptions were two Buddhist participants.


FIGURE 1: CLASS SIZES

EmoClass 4 (5.5%): relatively high. The LCA’s goodness-of-fit statisticsare shown in Table 5.

TABLE 5: PARTICIPANTS’ EMOTIONAL CLOSENESS TO THE CONFLICT:GOODNESS-OF-FIT STATISTICS OF THE LCA.

Number of classes LOG-LIKE n(P) df AIC

1 −3359,30 27 194372 6772,60

2 −3060,17 55 194344 6230,34

3 −3018,67 83 194316 6203,34

4 −2944,04 111 194288 6110,08

5 −2926,28 139 194260 6130,56

Saturated model −2495,01 194399 393788,02

With increasing closeness, the share of participants who do not feelattached to either side declines (Figure 2), the participants’ attachmentshifts toward the Israelis (Figure 3), the participants feel more deeplyaffected by the conflict (Figure 4), and they also feel better informed aboutit (Figure 5). The greater their closeness, the more often they have visitedIsrael and/or the Palestinian territories (Figure 6), the more they have hadpersonal contacts with Israelis and/or with Palestinians (Figure 7), and themore they have Israeli and/or Palestinian friends, acquaintances, or relatives(Figure 8).

The relatively low familiarity of the participants with the Israeli-Pales-tinian conflict is also reflected in the results on emotional ambivalence. Onaverage (Figure 9), the participants have no opinion about whether peace


FIGURE 2: ATTACHMENT TO NEITHER SIDE

FIGURE 3: ATTACHMENT TO ONE OR BOTH SIDES

FIGURE 4: AFFECTED BY THE CONFLICT


FIGURE 5: KNOWLEDGE

FIGURE 6: VISITS TO ISRAEL AND/OR THE PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES

FIGURE 7: PERSONAL CONTACT WITH ISRAELIS AND/OR PALESTINIANS


FIGURE 8: ISRAELI AND/OR PALESTINIANS FRIENDS,ACQUAINTANCES, OR RELATIVES

FIGURE 9: EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE

would be threatening for the Israelis (ambi04i = 3)2 or whether it couldoffer them security (ambi03i = 3). Otherwise, they prefer a peace solutionto the status quo (war): War is regarded as threatening not only for theIsraelis (ambi02i = 4) but also for the Palestinians (ambi02p > 3), and ableto offer security to neither the Palestinians (ambi01p = 2) nor the Israelis(ambi01i < 3). Conversely, at least for the Palestinians peace does notrepresent a threat (ambi04p < 3), and can even offer security (ambi03p > 3).

2. All statements are based on a level of significance of p < 0.05.


The distribution in Figure 9 is, however, not homogenous, but rather amixed distribution of various answer patterns. The LCA of the emotionalambivalence scale identified six typical patterns that, altogether, regard theconsequences of peace as less threatening and offering more security forPalestinians than for Israelis, for whom peace is (in part) even regarded as asecurity risk. In addition, the status quo (war) is regarded as more threaten-ing to the Israelis, but—on the other hand—is judged to threaten Palestiniansecurity interests even more than those of the Israelis. The LCA goodness-of-fit statistics are given in Table 6.

TABLE 6: PARTICIPANTS’ EMOTIONAL AMBIVALENCE:GOODNESS-OF-FIT STATISTICS OF THE LCA


1 −6633,36 48 5764752 13362,72

2 −6217,59 97 5764703 12629,18

3 −6072,16 146 5764654 12436,32

4 −5968,23 195 5764605 12326,46

5 −5892,23 244 5764556 12272,46

6 −5817,95 293 5764507 12221,90

7 −5773,37 342 5764458 12230,74

Saturated model −3410,73 5764800 11536421,46

AmbiClass 6: No opinion. Class 6 is a very small class that includesonly 1.3% of all the participants. The members of this class leave more than64% of all questions unanswered, answer 3.5% of the questions with “don’tknow,” and have no opinion about whether war or peace creates threats oroffers security for either side (Figure 10).

All the other classes agree that war does not offer security for thePalestinians and poses threats for the Israelis.

AmbiClass 5: Rather weak judgments. Among these other classes, Class 5(Figure 11) is also characterized by rather weak judgments (78.6% “don’tknow” responses). Nonetheless, the participants in this class regard war asthreatening for the Israelis (ambi02i > 3) and have a significant opinion thatwar can offer security neither for Israel (ambi01i < 3) nor for the Palestini-ans (ambi01p < 3). But they are undecided about whether war is threateningfor the Palestinians as well, and/or what the consequences of peace mightbe for either of the parties.

AmbiClass 1: Distinct judgments, with no ambivalence. Class 1 is charac-terized by rather distinct judgments (5.4% “don’t know” responses) with no


FIGURE 10: NO OPINION

FIGURE 11: RATHER WEAK JUDGMENTS

FIGURE 12: DISTINCT JUDGMENTS, WITH NO AMBIVALENCE


ambivalence (Figure 12). War is threatening for both sides (ambi02i > 4;ambi02p = 4) and cannot offer security for either party (ambi01i < 2;ambi02p < 2). Peace offers security for both sides (ambi03i > 3; ambi03p >3) and poses no threat for either side (ambi04i < 3; ambi04p < 3).

AmbiClass 2: Less distinct judgments, but skeptical about the consequencesof peace for Israel. Class 2 (36.4% “don’t know” responses) shows a simi-lar—though less distinct—pattern (Figure 13; ambi01i < 3; ambi01p = 2;ambi02i = 4; ambi02p > 3; ambi03p > 3; ambi04p < 3). Participants in thisclass, however, are more skeptical about the consequences of peace for theIsraelis. They doubt whether peace can offer security for the Israelis(ambi03i < 3), and they have no opinion about whether it might pose threatsfor them (ambi04i = 3).

AmbiClass 4: Distinct judgments, without any opinions about the conse-quences of peace for Israel. Class 4 (10.7% “don’t know” responses) ischaracterized by rather distinct judgments as well (Figure 14; ambi01i < 3;ambi01p < 2; ambi02i > 4; ambi02p > 4; ambi04i = 3; ambi03p > 3;ambi04p < 3). In contrast to Class 1, however, participants in this class haveno opinion about whether peace can offer security for the Israelis (ambi03i= 3).

AmbiClass 3: Less distinct judgments, with no opinions about the conse-quences of peace for Israel. Class 3 (7.5% “don’t know” responses), finally,shows a similar—though less distinct—pattern (Figure 15; ambi01p < 3;ambi02i > 3; ambi02p > 3; ambi03i =3; ambi03p = 3; ambi04i = 3). Partici-pants in this class, however, likewise have no opinions about whether warmight offer security for Israel (ambi01i =3) and whether peace might bethreatening for the Palestinians (ambi04p = 3).

On average (Figure 16), the participants display a neutral peace orien-tation that, to be sure, is more critical of Palestinian terror attacks (iwar05 =4) than of Israeli military operations (pwar05 > 3), but conversely, however,is only against denying legitimacy to the Palestinians (iwar03 < 3), but notagainst denying legitimacy to the Israelis (pwar03 = 3).

While the participants tend to dispute not only the legitimacy of thePalestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 < 3), but also that of the Israelidefensive war (iwar04 < 3) and to accuse the Palestinian leadership of stub-bornness in similar measure as they accuse Israeli leaders of this (iwar02 >3) (pwar02 > 3), they reject the conception that the Israeli state must becompelled to yield by means of military force (pwar01 < 2) just as clearlyas the view that the Palestinian leadership can only be induced to recognizeIsrael with military force (iwar01 < 2).

Instead, the participants clearly think that a solution to the conflict canonly be found through negotiation (npeace01 > 4), that it must take into


FIGURE 13: LESS DISTINCT JUDGMENTS, BUT SKEPTICAL

ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES OF PEACE FOR ISRAEL

FIGURE 14: DISTINCT JUDGMENTS, WITHOUT ANY OPINIONS


FIGURE 15: LESS DISTINCT JUDGMENTS, WITH NO OPINIONS



FIGURE 16: POSITIONING TO THE CONFLICT

account the necessities of life of both populations (npeace03 > 4), and thatall the participants should work toward ensuring that not only will the Israe-lis be able to look forward to a peaceful future without fear (ipeace01 > 4),but also that the Palestinians will be able to lead a peaceful and self-deter-mined life (ppeace01 > 4).

The distribution in Figure 16 is, however, not homogeneous, but rathera mixed distribution of various answer patterns. The LCA of the positioningscale identified eight typical patterns, all of which support conflict resolu-tion through negotiation and condemn Palestinian terror attacks.

• Two of the latent classes (10.07%) endorse peace but are not suffi-ciently familiar with the conflict to have a clear opinion about it (50-68% no response or “don’t know”).

• Three of them (31.84%) interpret the conflict within a more or lessneutral peace frame with relatively high uncertainty (20-25% noresponse or “don’t know”).

• Two of them (51.11%) hold a pro-Palestinian frame and are rathersure of their evaluations (max. 3% no response or “don’t know”);and

• A small group of participants (7%) that is fairly sure of its evalua-tions (3.4% no response or “don’t know”) interprets the conflictaccording to a pro-Israeli war frame.

The LCA goodness-of-fit statistics are given in Table 7.

PosiClass 8: Support of peace without partisanship. Class 8 (Figure 17) is avery small class that includes only 1.64% of all participants. The membersof this class leave 46% of all questions unanswered, answer 5% of the ques-


TABLE 7: PARTICIPANTS’ POSITIONING TO THE CONFLICT:GOODNESS-OF-FIT STATISTICS OF THE LCA


1 −11085,26 84 6,78E+11 22338,52

2 −10374,51 169 6,78E+11 21087,02

3 −10069,66 254 6,78E+11 20647,32

4 −9830,46 339 6,78E+11 20338,92

5 −9673,03 424 6,78E+11 20194,06

6 −9487,20 509 6,78E+11 19992,40

7 −9389,14 594 6,78E+11 19966,28

8 −9303,28 679 6,78E+11 19964,56

9 −9255,27 764 6,78E+11 20038,54

Saturated model −3474,71 6,78223E+11 1,36E+12

FIGURE 17: SUPPORT OF PEACE WITHOUT PARTISANSHIP

tions with “don’t know,” and have no opinion about most issues. In contrastto the members of all the other classes, who condemn Palestinian terrorattacks, they do not even have an opinion on this question (iwar05 = 3).Instead, they tend not only to deny the legitimacy of the Israeli defensivestruggle (iwar04 < 3), but also to reject the exercise of military force againstIsrael (pwar01 = 2) and to support a negotiated settlement (npeace01 = 4).


FIGURE 18: SUPPORT OF MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL PEACE

PosiClass 5: Support of mutually beneficial peace. The answer pattern inClass 5 (Figure 18) is characteristic of 8.43% of the participants. The mem-bers of this class likewise have no opinion with regard to many issues andanswer 68% of all questions with “don’t know.”

In comparison with Class 8, the members of this class favor a negoti-ated settlement somewhat less strongly (npeace01 >3). They instead advo-cate a conflict settlement that would take into account the necessities of lifeof both populations (npeace03 = 4), and in particular guarantee a peacefulfuture without fear for the Israelis (ipeace01 = 4) but also ensure a peaceful,self-determined life for the Palestinians (ppeace01 > 3). At the same time,they tend not only to reject military pressure against Israel (pwar01 < 3),but also against the Palestinians (iwar01 < 3).

PosiClass 3: Neutral peace frame. The answer pattern in Class 3 (Figure19) is characteristic of 15.9% of the participants, who answer 26% of thequestions with “don’t know.”

The members of this class emphasize the necessities of life of both theIsraelis (ipeace01 > 4) and the Palestinians (ppeace01 > 4) in the samemeasure and advocate a negotiated settlement (npeace01 = 4) that takes intoaccount the necessities of life of both societies (npeace03 > 4).

They reject equally definitely the notion that the Israeli state can onlybe induced to yield by military force (pwar01 = 2) and the view that only byforce of arms can the Palestinian leadership be induced to recognize Israel(iwar01 = 2).

They reject the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle(pwar04 < 3) as much as they do that of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 <


FIGURE 19: NEUTRAL PEACE FRAME

3) and criticize Israel (pwar02 > 3) and the Palestinian leadership (iwar02 >3) equally for stubbornness and/or intransigence.

While they disapprove of violence on both sides, they nonetheless con-demn Palestinian terror attacks more strongly (iwar05 = 4) than Israeli mili-tary operations (pwar05 > 3); at the same time, they also doubt that thedestruction of Israel is the goal of the Palestinian leadership (iwar03 < 3).

PosiClass 4: Neutral peace frame, more definite but less critical. Theanswer pattern in Class 4 (Figure 20) is characteristic of 10.8% of the par-ticipants, who answer 29% of the questions with “don’t know.” The mem-bers of this class differ from Class 3 in favoring a negotiated settlementsomewhat more strongly (npeace01 > 4) and still more emphatically rejectthe employment of military force not only against the Israeli state (pwar01< 2), but also against the Palestinian leadership (iwar01 = 1). As well theyreject the legitimacy of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 = 2) and/or the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 = 2) somewhat more definitely andreject Palestinian terror attacks still more strongly than does Class 3 (iwar05> 4). On the other side, they criticize neither Israel (pwar02 = 3) nor thePalestinian leadership (iwar02 = 3) for being stubborn and/or intransigent.

PosiClass 7: Peace frame, critical of Israel. The answer pattern in Class 7(Figure 21) is characteristic of 5.14% of the participants, who answer 24%of the questions with “don’t know.” The members of this class favor anegotiated settlement somewhat less strongly (npeace01 > 3) and emphasizethe necessities of life of both populations (npeace03 = 4; ipeace01 > 3;ppeace01 > 3) to a lesser extent than the other two classes. They also, but


FIGURE 20: NEUTRAL PEACE FRAME, MORE DEFINITE BUT LESS CRITICAL

FIGURE 21: PEACE FRAME, CRITICAL OF ISRAEL

less definitely, reject the employment of military force against the Israelistate (pwar01 < 3) and/or against the Palestinian leadership (iwar01 < 3).

Unlike the other two classes, they do not defend the Palestinian leader-ship against the accusation that they aim to destroy Israel (iwar03 = 3), butthey do impute to Israeli policy the aim of continuing to oppress and disen-franchise the Palestinians (pwar03 > 3). At the same time, they dispute onlythe legitimacy of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04 < 3), but not, however,that of the Palestinian liberation struggle (pwar04 = 3); they condemn Pal-estinian terror attacks less strongly than the other two classes (iwar05 > 3);


and criticize only Israel (pwar02 < 3), but not the Palestinian leadership(iwar02 = 3) for being stubborn and/or intransigent.

PosiClass 1: Peace frame, pro-Palestinian. The answer pattern in Class 1(Figure 22) is characteristic of 26.24% of the participants, who answer lessthan 3% of the questions with “don’t know” or leave them unanswered(0.26%).

Similar to Class 3 (neutral peace frame), the members of this class alsosupport a negotiated settlement (npeace01 = 4) that takes into account thenecessities of life of both societies (npeace03 = 4). They emphasize thenecessities of life of the Palestinians somewhat more strongly, however(ppeace01 > 4), than those of the Israelis (ipeace01 = 4).

Like Class 3, they also reject the view that the Israeli state can only beinduced to yield by force of arms (pwar01 = 2) just as definitely as the viewthat the Palestinian leadership can only be induced by military pressure torecognize Israel (iwar01 = 2).

In agreement with Class 3, they reject the legitimacy of the Palestinianliberation struggle (pwar04 < 3) to the same extent as that of the Israelidefensive war (iwar04 < 3) and criticize Israel (pwar02 > 3) and the Pales-tinian leadership (iwar02 > 3) to the same extent for stubbornness and/orintransigence. Also similar to Class 3, they doubt that the destruction ofIsrael is the goal of the Palestinian leadership (iwar03 < 3). While theycondemn the violence on both sides equally strongly (iwar05 >3; pwar05 >3), they disapprove of Palestinian terror attacks somewhat less strongly thandoes Class 3.

FIGURE 22: PEACE FRAME, PRO PALESTINIAN


PosiClass 2: Pro-Palestinian frame, with an enemy image of Israel. Theanswer pattern in Class 2 (Figure 23) is characteristic of 24.87% of theparticipants, who answer less than 3% of the questions with “don’t know”or leave them unanswered (0.44%).

The members of this class favor a negotiated settlement (npeace01 > 4)that would take into account the necessities of life of both populations(npeace03 >3) still more strongly than Class 1; they emphasize as well thenecessities of life of both the Palestinians (ppeace01 > 4), and the Israelis(ipeace01 > 4) to a somewhat greater extent.

In addition, they more strongly reject the view that the Israeli state(pwar01 < 2) or respectively the Palestinian leadership (iwar01 < 2) canonly be induced to yield or respectively to recognize Israel by employingmilitary force, and they condemn the violence on both sides (iwar05 = 4;pwar05 >3) still more strongly than the members of Classes 1 and 3.

They contest, however, the legitimacy of the Israeli defensive war(iwar04 < 2) even more strongly than that of the Palestinian liberationstruggle (pwar04 < 3) and accuse only Israel (pwar02 = 4), but not thePalestinians (iwar02 = 3) of stubbornness and/or intransigence. And, whilethey defend the Palestinian leadership against the accusation that they arepursuing the goal of destroying Israel (iwar03 < 3), they accuse Israel ofaiming to continue to oppress and disenfranchise the Palestinians (pwar03 >3).

FIGURE 23: PRO-PALESTINIAN FRAME, WITH AN ENEMY IMAGE OF ISRAEL


PosiClass 6: Pro-Israeli war frame. The answer pattern in Class 6 (Figure24) is characteristic of 6.97% of the participants, who answer somewhatmore than 3% of the questions with “don’t know.”

To be sure, the members of this class also favor a negotiated settlement(npeace01 = 4) that takes into account the necessities of life of both socie-ties (npeace03 > 4), emphasizing, however, Israeli necessities of life(ipeace01 > 4) somewhat more strongly than those of the Palestinians(ppeace01 > 4) and rejecting the notion that the Israeli state can only beforced by military means to cooperate (pwar01 < 2) more strongly than theview that the Palestinian leadership can only be induced with military pres-sure to recognize Israel (iwar01 = 2).

With regard to all other issues, they display a clearly polarized pattern:Whereas they accuse the Palestinian leadership of stubbornness (iwar02 =4), they defend Israel against the accusation of intransigence (pwar02 < 2);whereas they defend Israel against the accusation of pursuing the continuedoppression and disenfranchisement of the Palestinians (pwar03 = 2), theyallege that the Palestinian leadership aims to destroy Israel (iwar03 = 4);whereas they emphasize the legitimacy of the Israeli defensive war (iwar04= 4), they reject the legitimacy of the Palestinian defensive struggle(pwar04 = 2); and whereas they condemn Palestinian terror attacks (iwar05= 4), they justify Israeli military operations (pwar05 = 2).

FIGURE 24: PRO-ISRAELI WAR FRAME

A second-order LCA identified 5 groups of participants (Table 8) thatcan again be classified with respect to the participants’ emotional closenessto the conflict.


TABLE 8: GOODNESS OF FIT STATISTICS OF THE SECOND-ORDER LCA


1 −2589,22 15 176 5208,44

2 −2429,21 31 160 4920,42

3 −2385,66 47 144 4865,32

4 −2348,81 63 128 4823,62

5 −2320,41 79 112 4798,82

6 −2308,51 95 96 4807,02

Saturated model −2264,14 191 4910,28

With increasing emotional closeness, the distinctness of the partici-pants’ opinions regarding the consequences of war and peace also increases,and the mental models according to which they interpret the conflict changefrom sympathy for Israel (Class 4: 11.68%) to understanding for Israeliconcerns about peace (Class 2: 21.94%); to a pro-Palestinian perspective infavor of peace (Class 3: 20.68%) to a peace perspective to the benefit ofboth sides (Class 1: 35.94%); and finally to a polarization between peaceand the perpetuation of the status quo (Class 5: 9.76%).

Class 4: Sympathy for Israel. Though the participants in this group are quiteunfamiliar with the conflict and do not have a distinct frame from whichthey could take a stance, they display some empathy for Israel’s concernsabout peace and believe that both war and peace are a greater risk for Israelthan for the Palestinians (Figure 25). In this group, most of the participantsreveal very little emotional closeness to the conflict (EmoClass 3: 72.3%),and the distinctness of their opinions regarding the consequences of war and

FIGURE 25: SYMPATHY FOR ISRAEL


peace is also mostly low (AmbiClass 5: 72.1%). For the Palestinians, warmight perhaps create a threat (AmbiClasses 1-4: 27.8%) and offers nosecurity (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%). Peace might not create any threat(AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 25.8%) and might even offer them security(AmbiClasses 1-4: 27.8%). For Israelis, war creates a threat (AmbiClasses1-5: 99.9%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 97.9%). Peacepromises neither to create no threat (AmbiClass 1: 2.4%) nor to providesecurity (AmbiClass 1: 2.4%). Peace could possibly even pose a securityrisk (AmbiClass 2: 23.4%). Most participants in this group (79%; PosiClass5 = 77.4%, PosiClass 8 = 1.6%) endorse peace and condemn Palestinianviolence but are not sufficiently familiar with the conflict to have a distinctframe according from which they could take a position.

Class 2: Understanding for Israeli concerns about peace. On the basis of(slightly) greater familiarity with the conflict, the participants interpret itaccording to a neutral peace frame and reveal increased empathy for Israeliconcerns about peace (Figure 26). In this group, the participants show only

FIGURE 26: UNDERSTANDING FOR ISRAELI CONCERNS ABOUT PEACE

slightly more emotional closeness to the conflict (very low, EmoClass 3 =38.4%; low, EmoClass 1 = 39.6%) and the distinctness of their opinionsregarding the consequences of war and peace is mostly moderate(AmbiClass 2+3 = 66.1%). For Palestinians, war creates a threat(AmbiClasses 1-4: 88.4%) and likewise offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%). Peace probably would not create any threat (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4:77.9%) and does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 88.4%). For Israelis, warcreates a threat (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%) and offers no security(AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 89.4%). But peace neither promises not to createany threats (AmbiClass 1: 13.7%) nor to offer security (AmbiClass 1:


13.7%)—and is probably even a security risk (AmbiClass 2: 55.6%).Nearly all of the participants in this group (96.4%) interpret the conflictaccording to a neutral peace frame (PosiClass 3 = 66.5%; PosiClass 4 =29.9%).

Class 3: Pro-Palestinian perspective in favor of peace. As their (still low)familiarity with the conflict further increases, the participants become lessconvinced of the threat the war poses to Israel, their empathy for Israel’sconcerns about peace again decreases, and the peace frame according towhich they interpret the conflict becomes biased in favor of the Palestinians(Figure 27). In this group, the participants’ emotional closeness to the con-

FIGURE 27: PRO-PALESTINIAN PERSPECTIVE IN FAVOR OF PEACE

flict ranges from very low (EmoClass 3 = 30.7%) through low (EmoClass 1= 31.4%) to moderate (EmoClass 2 = 33.8%), and the distinctness of theiropinions regarding the consequences of war and peace is mostly moderate(AmbiClass 2+3 = 76.1%). For Palestinians, war creates threat(AmbiClasses 1-4: 93.8%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-5:93.8%). Peace might perhaps create no threats (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 39.9%)and does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 93.8%). For Israelis, war doescreate threats (AmbiClasses 1-5: 93.8%) and might perhaps not offer anysecurity (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 39.9%). Peace promises neither to create nothreat (AmbiClass 1: 17.7%) nor to offer security (AmbiClass 1: 17.7%).Peace might perhaps even create a security risk (AmbiClass 2: 22.2%). Thegreat majority of participants in this group (87.4%) interpret the conflictaccording to a peace frame that is either pro-Palestinian (PosiClass 1:68.3%) or critical of Israel (PosiClass 7: 19.1%).


Class 1: Peace perspective in both sides’ benefit. As familiarity with theconflict increases, the participants believe that peace could offer securityand not create any threat for either of the sides. Losing their empathy forIsrael’s concerns about peace, they regard Israel as the main obstacle topeace. The pro-Palestinian bias increases, and an enemy image of Israeldevelops (Figure 28).

FIGURE 28: PEACE PERSPECTIVE IN BOTH SIDES’ BENEFIT

In this group, the participants show somewhat more emotional close-ness to the conflict (low, EmoClass 1 = 52.1%; moderate, EmoClass 2 =36.8%), and the distinctness of their opinions regarding the consequences ofwar and peace is mostly high (AmbiClass 1+4 = 81.6%). For Palestinians,war creates threat (AmbiClasses 1-4: 98.9) and offers no security(AmbiClasses 1-5: 100%). Peace would not create any threats(AmbiClasses 1-2, 4: 91.7%) and does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4:98.9%).

For Israelis, war does create threats (AmbiClasses 1-5: 100%) anddoes not offer security (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 92.9%). Peace would proba-bly not create threats (AmbiClass 1: 67.5%), probably offers security(AmbiClass 1: 67.5%), and does not appear to create a security risk(AmbiClass 2: 10.1%).

The great majority of participants in this group (89.3%) interprets theconflict according to a pro-Palestinian frame which is either a pro-Palestin-ian peace frame (PosiClass 1: 34.4%) or a peace frame bordering on a warframe that already includes an enemy image of Israel (PosiClass 2: 54.9%).

Class 5: Polarization between peace and the perpetuation of the status quo.In this group, which is the one (relatively) most familiar with the conflict,the uncertainties of peace for Israel split the participants. They either form


an enemy image of Israel or of the Palestinians, and they expect the enemyto bear the burdens—either of peace to the benefit of the Palestinians or ofperpetuating the status quo (Figure 29). In this group, the participants’ emo-

FIGURE 29: POLARIZATION BETWEEN PEACE AND

THE PERPETUATION OF THE STATUS QUO

tional closeness to the conflict is either mainly moderate (EmoClass 2 =61.7%) or relatively high (EmoClass 4 = 27.4%), and the distinctness oftheir opinions regarding the consequences of war and peace is also high(AmbiClass 1+4 = 79.5%). For Palestinians, war creates threats(AmbiClasses 1-4: 99.9%) and offers no security (AmbiClasses 1-5:99.9%). Peace probably does not create any threats (AmbiClasses 1-2, 4:79.5%) but does offer security (AmbiClasses 1-4: 99.9%). For Israelis, warcreates threats (AmbiClasses 1-5: 99.9%) and probably offers no security(AmbiClasses 1-2, 4-5: 79.5%). But peace neither promises to create nothreats (AmbiClass 1: 0.8%) nor to offer security (AmbiClass 1: 0.8%).Nonetheless, peace is also not regarded as a security risk (AmbiClass 2:0%). The great majority of the participants in this group (88.8%) are for oneor the other side in the conflict. They interpret the conflict either accordingto a pro-Palestinian frame with a clear enemy image of Israel (PosiClass 2 =45.7%) or according to a pro-Israeli war frame (43.1%).

DISCUSSION

The results of this pilot study show that both the scales we constructedand the strategy of data analysis we employed are suitable for reconstruct-ing the mental models with which the study participants interpret theIsraeli-Palestinian conflict. Nonetheless, we intend to modify the scales


somewhat in our forthcoming field study. Since the positioning itemsiwar01 and pwar01 were rejected throughout by all of the groups who hadformed a mental model of the conflict, we will replace them with theweaker statements: iwar01—The Palestinian leadership must be forced torecognize Israel; pwar01—The Israeli government must be forced to makeconcessions to the Palestinians.

The results of the study also support most of our hypotheses. In agree-ment with Hypothesis 1, the majority of the participants (PosiClasses 1, 3,4, and 7; 58.08%) interpret the conflict according to a peace frame. In orderto be able to position oneself, however, a minimum of familiarity with theconflict is necessary (Hypothesis 2): PosiClasses 5 and 8 (10.07%) endorsepeace, but they are insufficiently familiar with the conflict to have a clearopinion about it. Contrary to expectations (Hypothesis 3), in our sample wecould to be sure identify neutral (PosiClasses 3 and 4; 26.7%), Israel-critical(PosiClass 7; 5.14%), and pro-Palestinian (PosiClass 1; 26.24%) peaceframes, but no pro-Israeli peace frame. In agreement with Hypothesis 7,only a minority of the participants interpret the conflict in a war frame.While there is certainly a relatively large group of participants who interpretthe conflict according to a pro-Palestinian frame that borders on a warframe (PosiClass 2; 24.87%), contrary to our expectations, however, wecould find only a pro-Israeli (PosiClass6; 7.0%), but not a pro-Palestinianwar frame.

Based on the tendencies we found, the results of the second-order LCAnevertheless confirm our supposition that as familiarity with the conflictincreases there is pressure to take a stance in favor of one party or the other(Hypothesis 4), and finally also in the direction of a war frame (Hypothesis6): Those participants (Class 4) who are the least familiar with the conflictdo indeed display sympathy for Israel, but most of them, however (79.0%),are not sufficiently familiar with the conflict to have a distinct frameaccording to which they could take a position. In all, 96.4% of the membersof Class 2, who are only slightly more familiar with the conflict, interpretthe conflict according to a neutral peace frame, and those participants whoare the most familiar with the conflict (Class 5) are polarized into the mostradical pro-Israeli (PosiClass 6; 43.1%) and pro-Palestinian (PosiClass 2;45.7%) positions. Also, most (89.3%) of the members of Class 1, which isin second place, interpret the conflict according to a partisan (pro-Palestin-ian) frame.

That the ambivalence of the frames is often overlooked due to cooper-ative misperception (Hypothesis 5) is likewise confirmed: The ambivalenceof the war for both sides is consistently overlooked. Apart from a verysmall minority (AmbiClass 6; 1.3%), all agree that war can offer the Pales-tinians no security and is a threat to Israel. The largest group of participants


(AmbiClass 1; 29.9%) perceives for both sides only the negative aspects ofthe war and only the positive aspects of peace. That peace is ambivalent forthe Palestinians is not seen by any of the groups. Only 1/4 of the partici-pants (AmbiClass 2; 24.2 %) grasps that peace can also represent a securityrisk for Israel, and about 1/3 of the participants (AmbiClasses 3 and 4;33.6%) have no opinion regarding the consequences of peace for Israel.

The expectation was likewise confirmed that participants who interpretthe conflict in the sense of a war frame also agree with the call for a negoti-ated settlement (Hypothesis 8) that takes equal account of the necessities oflife of both populations (Hypothesis 9): Like all the other classes, not onlyPosiClass 6 (pro-Israeli war frame), but also PosiClass 2 (pro-Palestinianframe bordering on a war frame) favor a negotiated settlement of the con-flict (npeace01) that must take into account the necessities of life of bothpopulations (npeace03).

The supposition is not confirmed, however, that this support willincrease if the radicalism of the war frame increases (Hypothesis 10):Whereas PosiClass 2 supports both demands (negotiated settlement and tak-ing account of both sides’ needs) the most strongly of all the classes,PosiClass6 is only in the middle range with regard to both demands.

But Hypothesis 11 was confirmed: The more the participants positionthemselves in favor of one side, the more they will emphasize the necessi-ties of life of this side more strongly than those of the opposing side:PosiClass 2 and PosiClass 6 are the only classes that emphasize the necessi-ties of life of one side significantly more strongly than those of the other (p< .05). PosiClass 2 emphasizes those of the Palestinians more strongly (M =4.77) than those of the Israelis (M = 4.47), and PosiClass 6 emphasizesthose of the Israelis (M = 4.85) more strongly than those of the Palestinians(M = 4.51).

Although the present study is not representative, it still gives someinsight into how (mainly) young educated people in Germany and Austriarelate to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conflict resolution through negotia-tion is supported by the participants across the board, and yet the partici-pants still consistently condemn Palestinian terror attacks more severelythan Israeli military operations—even after the Gaza war, which saw publicopinion shift toward a quite critical view of Israeli warfare.

Participants unfamiliar with the conflict show sympathy for Israel (sec-ond-order LCA, Class 4) and/or understanding for Israeli concerns aboutpeace (second-order LCA, Class 2). Those participants who sympathizewith the Palestinians (second-order LCA, Class 3) also favor peace and donot interpret the conflict according to a war frame.


The largest group of participants (second-order LCA, class 1: 35.94%)has a mental model calling for a peace settlement in the interest of bothsides. The participants in this group, however, show no empathy for Israel’sconcerns about peace, they tend to form an enemy image of Israel; and, dueto the disappointment of cooperation expectations, express a change in theirpeace frame to a war frame that seems to be programmed. Those partici-pants who are most familiar with the conflict (second-order LCA, class 5),finally, are divided into the groups of unconditional supporters of Israelipolicies who interpret the conflict according to a pro-Israeli war frame andsympathizers of the Palestinians, who interpret it according to a frame thatborders on a war frame.

However we interpret these results, they speak in any case for the viewthat criticism of Israel is a far too complex issue to simply reduce it toantisemitism. That criticism of Israel—besides other factors like pacifisticattitudes, concerns about human rights, moral disengagement, and/or theway the media report about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—can also beinfluenced by antisemitic attitudes is certainly not precluded. The questionof whether and to what extent this is the case cannot be answered on thebasis of the present data. It will be, however, the focus of forthcomingexperiments and field studies.

*Dr. Wilhelm Kempf is a professor of psychological methodology and head of thePeace Research Group at the University of Konstanz, Germany. His special areasof interest are nonviolent conflict resolution, conflict and peace journalism, and thesocial construction of reality. Since 2002, Dr. Kempf is the editor of conflict &communication online. Currently, he is conducting a research project on the rela-tions between Israel-criticism, modern antisemitism, and the media, funded by theGerman Research Society (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG], grant No.KE 300/8-1).

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Bergmann, Werner, and Rainer Erb. 1991a. “Mir ist das Thema Juden irgendwieunangenehm.” Kommunikationslatenz und die Wahrnehmung desMeinungsklimas im Fall des Antisemitismus. Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologieund Sozialpsychologie, 43(3): 502-519.

———. 1991b. Antisemitismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland: Ergebnisseder empirischen Forschung von 1946-1989. Opladen: Leske + Budrich.

Cohen, Florette, Lee Jussim, Kent Harber, and Gautam Bhasin. 2009. “ModernAnti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Attitudes.” Journal of Personality and SocialPsychology, 97(2): 290-306.

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Der Standard, 1/6/2010. Gaza-Hilfsflotte: User toben sich auf Facebookantisemitisch aus. http://derstandard.at/1271377916109/Gaza-Hilfsflotte-User-toben-sich-auf-Facebook-antisemitisch-aus. Retrieved August 11, 2010.

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Frindte, Wolfgang, Dorit Wammetsberger, and Susan Wettig. 2005a. “A New Typeof Antisemitism in Germany: Is Reconciliation Possible?” In Democratization,Europeanization, and Globalization Trends, edited by Russell Farnen, HenkDekker, Christ de Landtsheer, Heinz Sunker, and Daniel B. German, 277-293.Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang.

———. 2005b. “Old and New Antisemitic Attitudes in the Context ofAuthoritarianism and Social Dominance Orientation—Two Studies inGermany.” Peace and Conflict: The Journal of Peace Psychology, 11(3): 239-266.

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Heyder, Arie, Julia Iser, and Peter Schmidt. 2005. “Israelkritik oderAntisemitismus? Meinungsbildung zwischen Offentlichkeit, Medien undTabus.” In Deutsche Zustande, Folge 3, edited by Wilhelm Heitmayer, 144-165. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp.

Kaplan, Edward H., and Charles A. Small. 2006. “Anti-Israel Sentiment PredictsAntisemitism in Europe.” Journal of Conflict Resolution, 50(4): 548-561.

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van Dijk, Teun A., and Walter Kintsch. 1983. Strategies of DiscourseComprehension. New York: Academic Press.

Resentment Reloaded:How the European Radical Right MobilizesAntisemitism and Counter-Cosmopolitanism

Lars Rensmann*

Radical right parties have successfully mobilized voters in Europe in thelast few years. Yet, empirical studies of the radical right’s political ideol-ogy are scarce. This article offers a comparative analysis of party plat-forms and political mobilizations of relevant radical right electoralcompetitors. It reveals not only cross-national variations but also anemerging transnational and modernized ideological profile: the combina-tion of anti-immigrant politics with fierce opposition to cultural and eco-nomic globalization, and especially an increasing presence ofantisemitism. Corresponding radical right mobilizations are engenderedby three favorable conditions: social demand, a changing public climate,and crises of globalization that feed into persistent resentments and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Antisemitism has not been replaced by otherresentments; instead, the new radical right plays its part in an evolving anew antisemitic international.

Key Words: Radical Right, Counter-Cosmopolitanism, Antisemitism, Anti-Muslim, Anti-Zionism, Anti-Immigrant

THE ANTISEMITISM OF THE RADICAL RIGHT

Established parties in advanced European democracies face the persis-tent challenge of new and modernized radical right parties. They also epito-mize challenges to Europe’s politico-cultural cosmopolitanization (Beckand Grande 2007) and the developing multi-level polity of the EuropeanUnion at large (Kitschelt 2007; Mudde 2007). In fact, Europe’s transforma-tion from predominantly ethnic-nationalist self-understandings to the broadrecognition of cosmopolitan diversity and inclusion of minorities has comea long way. But it also remains contested and conflict-ridden, as contempo-rary controversies over immigration policy and anti-immigrant politics indi-cate. The same can be said about European antisemitism and its legacy.

New radical right parties can be viewed as part of that contestation,while their mobilization success varies and is often dependent on contextualfactors (Arzheimer 2009). To a large extent, these parties are politicallydiscredited actors and marginalized in European party systems; they alsosucceed, however, in mobilizing voters in many regions across Europe, and

543


they often have direct and indirect political leverage (Minkenberg and Per-rineau 2007). To be sure, their partly dramatic electoral successes (SeeTable 1) and electoral performances fluctuate in most contexts and are moredifficult to predict than those of their party system competitors. In severalcases, however, they are not marginal any longer but even have becomejunior partners in elected democratic governments (Frolich-Steffen andRensmann 2007). This includes the heart of Western Europe. Think of theLega Nord in Italy—one of the European Union’s original six members. InEastern Europe, the radical right party Jobbik, with its strong ties to neo-Nazis and its own paramilitary organization, gained 17% in the 2010 gen-eral parliamentary election in Hungary (Hockenos 2010), a country now

TABLE 1: ELECTORAL RESULTS OF RELEVANT* EXTREME-RIGHT PARTIES IN

PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS IN FIFTEEN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES, 1984-2010.

1984-1989 1990-1994 1995-1999 2000-2005 2006-2010

AN (Italy) 5,9 (MSI) 5,4-13,5 15,7 12,0 11,5**LN (Italy) - 8,6 8,4-10,1 3,9 5,1-8,3

11,0-FPO (Austria) 9,6 16,6 21,9-26,9 10,0 17,54***DF (Denmark) - - 7,4 12,0-13,3 13,9PP (Norway) 8,35 6,3 15,3 14,6-22,1 22,9NPD (Germany) 0,6 0,3 0,3 0,4-1,6 1,5REPs (Germany) - 2,1-1,9 1,8 0,6 0,4DVU (Germany) - - 1,2 - -SNS (Slovakia) - 14,0-5,4 9,1 3,3 11,7VB (Belgium) 1,9 6,6 7,8-9,9 11,6 12,0LPF (Netherlands) - - - 11,35 -****RMZ (Czech Republic) - 6,0 8,0-3,9 1,0 0,15Ataka (Bulgaria) - - - 8,9 9,36VMRO-BND (Bulgaria) - 6,5 9,4 5,7***** -FN (France) 9,7 12,6 15,0 11,3 4,3BNP (Great Britain) 0,0 0,1 0,1 0,2-0,7 1,9Jobbik******(Hungary) - - - 16,67LPR (Poland) - - - 7,9-8,0 1,3Samoobrona (Poland) 2,8 0,1 10,2-11,3 2,5PUNR (Romania) - 7,9 4,4 1,4 -*******PRM (Romania) - 3,9 4,5 19,5-13,0 3,15Sources: Norris 2005; Ignazi 2003; www.electionresources.org, www2.essex.ac.uk/elect/database; gesis.org.*Although consistently below the 3% threshold, which we take as a minimum level to classify as relevant, theNPD and the BNP are included as relevant parties because of the regional success and parliamentary represen-tation (NPD) and their success in the 2009 European parliamentary elections and their subsequent parliamen-tary representation in case of the BNP.**In 2008, AN no longer competed independently but under the umbrella of “Il Popolo della Liberta.” It is alsono longer classified as “extreme right.”***After split from the BZO.****LPF dissolved and did not compete in the 2006 election.*****On an electoral platform with two other small parties.******Jobbik was founded as a political party in 2003; in the 2006 elections it ran with MIEP, which hadpreviously gained 5.5% in the 1998 and 4.4% in the 2002 elections, turning the radical right into a consistentlyrelevant competitor.*******PUNR dissolved and did not compete in the 2008 election.

2011] RESENTMENT RELOADED 545

governed by a national-populist party (Fidesz) facilitating coded antisemit-ism and courting anti-Jewish voters.

Of fifteen European Union member states examined, six countries ofthe radical right have reached a new peak within the last election cycle(2006-2010). The still widespread claim that the radical right has remainedan isolated force or become completely irrelevant within the EuropeanUnion is therefore difficult to sustain, even if we only looked at electoralresults and neglect that the radical right is also a significant social move-ment and subculture. However, while the radical right has recently beenrecognized as a force to reckon with—in fact, the radical right is the mostscrutinized European party family today (Mudde 2007)—there is still astriking void in systematic comparative studies of the radical right’s politi-cal ideology, especially of its role in antisemitism.

The radical right’s anti-immigrant resentments, and especially anti-Muslim campaigns, have come under public and scientific scrutiny in recentyears (Mammone 2011). Yet, antisemitism as an ideological factor inmobilizing radical right voters has neither been systematically examined inscholarly research nor received much media attention, in spite of someheated scholarly meta-controversies about “new antisemitism”—that is, thepartial or full convergence of radical right, radical left, and Islamistantisemitism in the form of hatred of Israel and the chimera of “world Zion-ism.” While there are some notable exceptions—studies that explore theradical right and antisemitism (e.g., Rensmann 2008; 2011; Weitzman2006; 2010)—public and scholarly debates, in fact, often a priori presup-pose that antisemitism is an ideology that is past its expiration date, andthus also without significance in the radical right’s political and ideologicalmobilizations.1 Indeed, it is a widely shared belief in contemporary Euro-pean publics that antisemitism has largely dissipated, and generally becomesocially and politically irrelevant—even though such claims are difficult tosubstantiate and contradict social research findings. If antisemitism surfacesas a problem today, it is frequently suggested that it is instrumentalized andoverused, presumably constituting an ubiquitous political charge allegedlyemployed by Jewish and Israeli lobbies in order to suppress dissent andfence off criticism of Israel in Europe and the United States (see, forinstance, Walt and Mearsheimer 2008; for a scholarly critique of these

1. Strangely complementary to such biased presuppositions, some scholarswho critically examine the rise of new forms of antisemitism, and who plausiblysubstantiate the new antisemitism’s thesis about a partial left/right/Islamist conver-gence on the Jewish question and the Israel question, at times tend to view thecontemporary radical right as an irrelevant and marginal player, and thus also haveturned away from the empirical study of antisemitism in the radical right.


claims, see Lieberman 2009a, 2009b). In a similar vein, some scholars andpolitical pundits have suggested that the European radical right, with itsanti-Muslim vigor, has turned pro-Israel and pro-Jewish (Bunzl 2007), andthat Jewish organizations, in turn, now allegedly support the radical rightand xenophobia.2 Moreover, it has become popular to view Muslims as theJews of today, a trope that insinuates that Muslims are the subject of formsof systematic persecution in Europe that is similar to those that Jews havefaced in European history; and a trope that suggests that islamophobia hasgenerally replaced—not just complemented—antisemitism, i.e., hatred ofJews, in 21st-century Europe.3

2. Such claims, based on scarce evidence if any, also have political ramifica-tions: if Jews are linked to or associated with the European radical right and withfascist ideology, they are discredited, along with their possible support of the Jew-ish state of Israel. As will be shown, the Belgish Vlaams Belang may well be theonly relevant radical right party who has seriously tried—and failed—to court Jew-ish voters.

3. If antisemitism is no longer viewed as an acute challenge, it is also easier tosuggest that those who do address the issue are playing the antisemitism card forpolitical purposes, presumably to immunize Israel from criticism or to advance par-ticular Jewish interests. Over the last years, some media and scholars across theAtlantic have popularized the claim that Islamophobia is the new antisemitism (asopposed to those theories about new antisemitism that seek to conceptualize a newconvergence of radical right, radical-left, and Islamist hatred of Jews and Israel),and thus resentments—unquestionably significant—against Muslims and Islamhave taken antisemitism’s place in Europe and beyond (Bunzl 2007; Guarnieri2010). Yet, it is also popular to suggest that this presumed change is not recog-nized. While “anti-Semitism is recognized as an evil, noxious creed, and its adher-ents are barred from mainstream society and respectable organs of opinion,”Islamophobia is presumably widespread and well respected (Oborne 2008). Thisproposition is problematic in at least three ways: First, it suggests that antisemitismis always publicly identified as such and publicly refuted; while overt racial andNazi antisemitism has indeed long become largely illegitimate in mainstream pub-lic discourse, it can be questioned how far this applies to more subtle or codedforms and anti-Jewish stereotypes. The meaning of the term Islamophobia isequally unclear: does it entail, for instance, criticism of Islamism and criticism byMuslims and non-Muslims against politicized religious practices, or does it signifyracial hatred and discrimination against Muslims, which is a contemporary chal-lenge? Second, the assumption that antisemitism is barred from public life andreplaced by presumably legitimate Islamophobia suggests that antisemitism hasbecome irrelevant, although all existing survey data show that antisemitic resent-ments are far from isolated. Moreover, violent attacks against Jews, Jewish institu-tions, and synagogues continue to exceed—in actual numbers—those against allother minorities (although there are various national exceptions in the case of vio-lence against gypsies), including violence directed against Muslims, Muslim insti-tutions, and mosques. Third, while Jews and Muslims are subjected to


Looking at contemporary radical right ideology and its political con-text, this article challenges the aforementioned propositions. It claims thatwhile racialized hostility against Muslims takes an important role in manyradical right mobilizations alongside general anti-immigrant resentment,antisemitism remains an integral, indeed in many cases reinforced, elementof new radical right ideology. For much of the European radical right, how-ever, antisemitism continues to function as a constitutive, persistent con-spiracy ideology to explain the modern world and its crises. New radicalright parties thereby tend to modernize their ideology in order to increasetheir appeal, even though overtly racialized stereotypes of Jews, ethnicminorities, and immigrants—as well as Holocaust revisionism—continue tosurface in political campaigns; the alleged powerful conspirators of worldJewry, for instance, are today often called “world Zionists.”

In general, the word Zionist is increasingly being used as a synonymfor Jew to make antisemitic attacks on world Jewry sound respectable.Among the radical right and beyond, the chiffre—the Zionists—has gener-ally become the main code for the Jews in antisemitic discourses. It allowsblurring the boundaries between legitimate political critique, innuendo, andovert antisemitism while still mobilizing resentments—and also helps avoidpotential legal prosecution. In this ideological construct, Jews and the Zion-ists seek to dominate the world, orchestrate Zionist-Occupied Governments(ZOG) behind the scenes, and personify globalism and global modernity,including American and Zionist imperialism, the global financial system,and global capitalism.

discrimination in Europe today, it is empirically unjustified to simply pit one set ofresentments against another. Both racist prejudices against Muslims and antisemit-ism are on the rise, according to various survey data (PEW Global Attitudes Project2008). It is also worth mentioning, however, that the latter is quite distinct in itsnature. Antisemitism has generalizable dimensions, which are similar to otherforms of racial discrimination, and specific dimensions: antisemitism is a conspir-acy theory and, ultimately, a world explanation that, among other things, personi-fies problems of the modern world with Jews and explains these problems bypointing to Jewish machinations. In contemporary antisemitism, Jews are viewed asa secret power behind the world’s cosmopolitan cultural change, economic modern-ization, wars, and global conflicts. It is not just a generalizable form or religioushatred or prejudice; it also serves as a conspiratorial world explanation. In spite ofits generalizable dimensions, it is distinct in its profile from other forms of racialhatred (Rensmann and Schoeps 2011). Antisemitism is also different in conse-quence. Equating modern racism with antisemitism misconceives not only thenature of antisemitism, but also its societal origins, functions, and dynamics. Theclaim that Jews have been replaced by Muslims as the target of discrimination istherefore problematic. As David Ceserani (2008) has pointed out, The “Jews ofToday” are, and remain, Jews.


Furthermore, it is suggested that the radical right’s political antisemit-ism does not harm their political mobilizations but, on the contrary, feedsinto an increased public legitimacy of hostility against Jews; a hostility thatis fueled by social perceptions of the Middle East conflict and widespreadhatred of Israel as well as recent globalization crises. Such resentmentmarches in step with, and complements, anti-immigrant resentments andprejudices against ethnic minorities.

In the following section, we summarize findings of qualitative contentanalyses of radical right party manifestos and public campaigns in order toestablish the constitutive features of the European radical right’s contempo-rary ideology, which we summarize in comparative findings. We then lookat the demand side, the general political context, and favorable conditionsfor radical right mobilizations of resentment, focusing especially on theneglected resurgence of political antisemitism and the origins and causalmechanisms thereof.

A SEVEN-NATION SAMPLE

Here, we examine seven European national cases of radical right partymobilization and ideology based on a comparative study of 11 countriesaltogether.4 The study focuses on platforms and manifestos of relevant radi-cal right parties, including public statements by leaders, party Web pages,and political campaigns as components shaping the political ideology of theEuropean radical right.5 Special attention is paid to the modernization ofradical right party ideology. This includes the radical right’s responsivenessto counter-cosmopolitanism, and the way it modifies its propaganda againstblacks, immigrants, and Muslims, and particularly the role old-fashionedand modernized antisemitism plays in radical right mobilizations.

Poland

Success of the two most relevant extreme-right parties in Poland—theextreme right League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin—LPR) andthe national-protectionist agrarian-populist party Samoobrona, led byAndrzej Lepper—has been fluctuating, along with the still unconsolidatedand fluid Polish party system in its entirety. Both parties had temporarily

4. Summaries of the other qualitative content analyses have been discussedelsewhere (Rensmann 2011).

5. We classify parties as relevant that at least have shown some level of electo-ral success, that is, scoring at least temporarily 3% or more in regional or nationalelections.


significant electoral success in the first half of the 2000s: In the 2001 land-slide parliamentary elections, the LPR, just created before the elections,received 7.9%; Samoobrona, previously lacking electoral success, received10.2% and became the third-strongest party in Sejm, the lower house of thePolish parliament. Both parties repeated their success in 2005 (8.0% LPR;11.3% Samoobrona). While the LPR is also anchored in the ideologies ofthe nationalist prewar movement Endecja and Polish Catholic fundamental-ism, it links those traditions with contemporary issues, modernizedantisemitism, and anti-globalization rhetoric in the core of party ideology.In the first election campaign, LPR attacked President Aleksander Kwas-niewski of bowing to Jewish interests (Pankowski and Kornak 2005, 159).In its successful 2005 campaign, the party combined national protectionismwith economic protectionism against globalization and mobilized thenational solidarity of a new IV Republic of Poland against privatizationrobbery (Kostrzebski 2005, 220ff.), thereby finding support among global-ization losers. Moreover, the LPR unconditionally opposes European Unionmembership, which it characterizes as anti-Christian (Kostrzebski 2005,214). After 2005, however, the party lost its initial support of some power-ful Catholic civil society agents and media such as Radio Marija, which isconnected to the Schiller Institute of the antisemitic U.S. billionaire LyndonLaRouche (Gazeta Wyborcza, March 9, 2005). The agrarian-populistSamoobrona party lacks Catholic rhetoric, or a similarly distinct radicalright and antisemitic programmatic profile. Yet, in spite of socialist eco-nomic policy orientations, the party can be classified as populist radicalright, and it also nurtures a combination of authoritarian ethno-national pop-ulism, anti-immigrant resentments, and antisemitism, which is characteristicfor both old and new radical right party ideology. Party leader Lepper, forinstance, publicly glorifies democratic dictatorship, the Nazi propagandaminister Goebbels, and the French radical rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen(Pankowski and Kornak 2005, 160). While Goebbels represents the old fas-cist/Nazi and antisemitic right, Le Pen represents, as Piero Ignazi (2003)has pointed out, the prototype of the new extreme or radical right. Samoob-rona modernized its ideology, distanced itself from right-wing extremism,and received dramatic electoral gains in return. The party now focuses onpolitical isolationism and a national-protectionist anti-globalization andanti-European Union platform, though there are links to open antisemitismthrough the personnel of the party elite (http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semi-tism/asw2005/poland.html).

While their new ideological formulas and political mobilizations haveproven successful in reaching out to broader parts of the disenfranchisedelectorate, their short performance as junior partners in government in2006-2007 was not: in response to party scandals and the unwillingness to


agree to new elections, turnout for both parties collapsed at the ballot box in2007 (1.3% LPR; 2.5% Samoobrona) and they had to leave the Sejm.Roman Giertych stepped down as LPR party leader; neither party recoveredfrom this slide in the 2009 European elections. In terms of ideological sup-ply-side transformations, however, both parties exemplify (a) the turn to“counter-cosmopolitan modernization” and (b) subsequent electoralsuccess.

Hungary

MIEP (Magyar Igazsag es Elet Partja-Hungarian Party for Justice andLife) has been the electorally most successful radical right party in post-Communist Hungary but faded in relevance in recent years. Under theauthoritarian leadership of Istvan Csurka, the party promotes exclusivistnationalism and expansionist ambitions, especially with regard to the Hun-garian ethnic minority under foreign rule (www.miep.hu). The 2002national electoral campaign particularly focused on an interrelated set ofanti-globalization, antisemitism, anti-Communism, and anti-Israel issues.Initially viewing any cooperation with the West as part of a U.S.-Zionistplan, MIEP continues to oppose European Union membership and promotesa distinctly anti-Jewish anti-globalization ideology: bankers, for instance,are portrayed as a bunch of Jews sucking the money of average people.Viewing cosmopolitan Judeo-Bolshevik plutocrats and cosmopolitanismand globalization as the main enemy, the party has explained electoral suc-cesses of the left and allegedly ongoing Communist rule by referring toJewish-Zionist activity (Stephen Roth Institute 2002). According to Csurka,Hungarians are being exploited and oppressed by Jews, who dominate theeconomy and literature. He also fears a Jewish conspiracy, whose perpetra-tors are sitting in New York and Tel Aviv (cited in Bos 2011). Antisemit-ism and hatred of Israel are the core elements of this extreme ethno-nationalist party, while resentment against minorities (or Muslims) is part ofthe party ideology but less central to its identity.

The party, however, has continuously lost votes since 1998 (5.5%)(2002: 4.4%). By 2006, electoral support for MIEP was down to 2.2%, inspite of the fact that it formed an electoral alliance with the initially evenmore radical Jobbik Magyarorszagert Mozgalom (Movement for a BetterHungary), and it virtually dissolved. Jobbik had taken MIEP’s place as themost significant political and electoral extreme-right force in Hungary, andoutperformed MIEP. By 2008, the now independent Jobbik was already at7% in national polls, and the party initially received a stunning 14.77% ofthe vote in the 2009 European elections. This turned Jobbik into the thirdstrongest party in Hungary, gaining three seats in the European Parliament.


It consolidated this position in the Hungarian party system by mobilizing anaverage of 16.67% of the voters in the two rounds of the 2010 nationalelections.

Replacing MIEP without being less radical in its ethnic nationalism,xenophobia, and especially antisemitism, Jobbik has managed to gain widerelectoral appeal after its separation from MIEP. Jobbik’s current chairmanis the young historian Gabor Vona, the modern face of the party, and itsbest-known and most popular politician is the human rights lawyer and lawprofessor Krisztina Morvai. Though Morvai, the head of Jobbik’s EP dele-gation, had worked as a women’s rights advocate at the United Nations andalso has a strong record in anti-Israel advocacy, her leadership role in thisradical right, extremely nationalistic party took many by surprise, and itinstantaneously helped Jobbik gain broader legitimacy in spite of its radicalplatform and the catering to militant fascists.

Jobbik’s campaign platform for the 2010 electoral campaign declaredthe reunification of the Hungarian nation, the rebuilding of Greater Hungaryfrom before 1919, and thus the redrawing of Hungary’s borders, to be thefirst priority and the party’s most important political goal—a radical right,nationalist, and expansionist claim that could ultimately be the cause for awar with its European neighbors. It shows very little political constraintsand fosters an agenda of radical orientation and rhetoric that openly attacksgypsies and Jewish capital. Its propaganda, along with a certain politicalsymbolism, is clearly reminiscent of the NYKP, or Hungarists—Hungary’sNazi party, which ruled in Hungary during the Nazi occupation between1944 and 1945 and which established a ruthless terror regime that collabo-rated in the Holocaust (Maegerle 2009).

Jobbik’s slightly more strategic mobilization focus is nostalgic Hun-garian nationalism opposition to globalism in its economic, political, andcultural dimensions. Along with the leadership role of a feminist humanrights lawyer, its fashionable opposition to globalism, the European Union,and foreign investment may turn the party into a prototype of a counter-cosmopolitan, modernized radical right party that seeks to mobilize bothnationalist core constituencies of radical right voters and a broader spec-trum of globalization losers. While all the indicators of counter-cosmopoli-tan ideological transformation are prevalent and highly significant,however, the party neither sacrifices its traditional fascist ideology and self-declared radicalism (www.jobbik.com) nor certain demonstrated mili-tancy—both of which, however, do not seem to alienate voters anyway.

In 2007, Jobbik created the Magyar Garda Kulturalis Egyesulet (Cul-tural Association of the Hungarian Guard). The Hungarian Guard is, alongwith the movement by the same name, a paramilitary, uniformed street mili-tia with sworn-in members designed “to awaken the active self conscious-


ness of the nation”; in 2009, the guard was prohibited. Jobbik has nevershied away from radical nationalist, racist, and antisemitic rhetoric. We findparty-affiliated publications that employ inflammatory rhetoric againstJews, Roma, and gays. Party members are also linked to anti-Roma andantisemitic violence (Freeman 2009).

Jobbik also proposes the creation of a national special police unit todeal with gypsy delinquency. While the party is open to militant ChristianHungarian nationalism and radicalism displayed by subgroups of the partyand segments of the party-elite level, it effectively broadened its appeal andtransformed its party ideology and identity; first and foremost, this entaileda strategic major focus on opposition to globalization and Europeanization.Reaching out to various disenfranchised segments of the Hungarian electo-rate, the modernized party platform is still dedicated to a combination ofanti-globalization views and coded popular antisemitism, alongside its pre-vious support of Christian values, Hungarian nationalism, and attacks onRoma and other ethnic minorities. Serving both radical nationalists and dis-illusioned voters, Jobbik’s economic policies are primarily directed against“the neoliberal ideology dominated policies during these years under thename of privatization, liberalization and deregulation” (Jobbik 2009), whileit also rejects the Lisbon treaty and European integration. In this way, Job-bik is capitalizing on increasing joblessness, corruption crises, and socialunrest caused by the global economic crisis. In light of widespread eco-nomic and cultural fears, the party mobilizes political and cultural resent-ments not only against pro-European and pro-cosmopolitan elites andminorities but also against multinational corporations, America, andIsrael—i.e. globalism, imperialism, and international institutions.

Jobbik’s rise indicates that there is considerable legitimate politicalspace for such counter-cosmopolitan, nationalistic, and antisemitic views inHungarian politics. Its success, in fact, is accompanied by a broader right-wing nationalist turn in Hungarian politics. Challenging conventional wis-dom about electorates and their spatial representation in the party system,there seems to be no tradeoff between party constituencies supporting xeno-phobia and nationalistic claims. On the one hand, due to various factors—including major corruption cases—the left-center Magyar Szocialista Part(MSZP), which was the major governing party for most of the post-Com-munist period, collapsed at the 2010 national elections, scoring only 19.3%.Severely weakened, MSZP is now barely the biggest opposition party. Onthe other hand, the national populist FIDESZ-Hungarian Civic Union(Fidesz—Magyar Polgari Szovetseg) gained 52.73% of the vote in 2010.Thus, it achieved an absolute majority that equipped the party with a 2/3majority in the national parliament and with the governmental power tomake sweeping changes to the legal system.


The national-populist FIDESZ, led by the populist prime ministerViktor Orban since its inception, also campaigns against anti-national ele-ments. While FIDESZ is less radical than Jobbik and combines variouspolitical constituencies in its policies, it also provides a government that isapparently sympathetic to radical nationalism and antisemitic resentment.Without being penalized by the party, FIDESZ member of parliamentOszkar Molnar, for instance, stated: “I love Hungary, I love Hungarians,and I prefer Hungarian interests to global financial capital, or Jewish capi-tal, if you like, which wants to devour the whole world, but especially Hun-gary.” Molnar, who also suggests that there is an Israeli conspiracy tocolonize Hungary, found widespread support, even though FIDESZ repre-sents a government that ratified an authoritarian media law severely restrict-ing freedom of speech under the pretense of fighting hate speech.

Hungary’s restrictive media laws and poor civil rights record as well asdiscrimination policies have increasingly come under scrutiny by the Euro-pean Union. However, it may also be a sign of the times and of a newassertiveness of the populist and radical right in Hungary and across Europewith regard to both xenophobia and antisemitism that Jobbik can flourishand that even politicians of the ruling party also mobilize resentmentsagainst Jews and gypsies without facing effective political opposition. TheCultural Institute of the Republic of Hungary, operating under the auspicesof the FIDESZ government, today initiates discussions about what they callthe “Jewish problem” and how to deal with it. It is doing so in Germany,that is, as part of transnational Hungarian cultural policy (Balassi Institute2011).

Another sign of public collaboration with the radical right and thelegitimacy of ethnic nationalism and antisemitism in Hungary is the factthat the mayor of Budapest, Istvan Tarlos, recently appointed Istvan Csurka,the leader of MIEP, and the nationalist Gyorgy Dorner as the directors ofthe Hungarian capital’s prestigious New Theater, despite concerns by Jew-ish groups and international condemnation. The new directors want torename the theater and act against what they call “the degenerate sick lib-eral hegemony,” and they demand that only Hungarian drama is performedand want to stop what they refer to as “foreign garbage,” which is viewed asa code word for Jewish and other non-Hungarian productions (Bos 2011).

Slovakia

The most relevant radical right party in Slovakia, Slovenska NarodnaStrana—SNS (Slovak National Party), has made attempts to modernize itsideological profile as well. SNS describes itself as a modern, national, con-servative, right-wing, Christian parliamentary party (www.sns.sk). Accord-


ing to three programmatic pillars, it also seeks to transcend the left-rightcleavage by claiming to be socialist, an ideological aspect that helped itspromotion to become junior partner in the socialist center-left governmentled by Smer, which is part of the Party of European Socialists of main-stream European social-democratic and socialist parties.6 The coalition gov-ernment, which makes the SNS the only Eastern European radical rightparty in a national government of a European Union member state, wasformed after the 2006 parliamentary elections, when SNS scored 11.7%, itsstrongest showing since the first post-Communist election in 1990. Yet, inspite of its partially modernized image, its electoral success, and itsassumed respectability as member of a government in the European Union,SNS hardly disguises its simultaneously radically ethnic-nationalist ideo-logical orientation and its successful creation of sustainable bridges to itsradical right core constituencies. The party explicitly praises radicalism,Slavic brotherhood, and the original Slovak culture on its Web sites and inits party platform. It also continues to promote xenophobia and barelycoded antisemitism (People Against Racism & Milo 2005, 213ff). Even thename SNS points to its roots in a Slovak radical nationalist party of the 19thcentury. Contrary to other modernized radical right parties, it does not dis-tance itself from fascist and antisemitic roots but seeks, in fact, to rehabili-tate Jozsef Tiso’s fascist war regime, which collaborated in the Holocaust.Tiso is portrayed as a martyr in the fight against Bolshevism and liberalism(People Against Racism & Milo 2005, 213ff; http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/asw2008/slovakia.html

Thus, while the SNS does adapt to new issues—initially, it primarilymobilized for national independence from the Czech Republic—its ideolog-ical modernization is very limited. Its core agenda is determined by conven-tional Slovak ethnic nationalism, which marches in step with both anti-immigrant racism and antisemitism; globalization is not a central campaignissue or a major factor shaping any ideological reorientation. While theparty attacks the European Union and supports both cultural/national andeconomic “socialist” protectionism, it is successful enough and not in needof modernizing its image, especially in times of a larger European Unioncrisis. Its campaigning is aimed at law and order issues, which are com-bined with overt discrimination and attacks against ethnic minorities, espe-cially the Hungarian minority and Rom people—which, according to theSNS, are criminals who should be sterilized (People Against Racism &Milo 2005, 214; http://www.sns.sk). The racist ideological profile of thisanti-liberal radical right government party certainly creates problems for

6. The party had been in government for the first time under the populistHZDS and Vladimir Meciar between 1994 and 1998.


European Union anti-discrimination guidelines and the European Union’scosmopolitan image and legitimacy.

Italy

While the Alleanza Nazionale, successor to the fascist MovimentoSociale Italiano (MSI), can no longer be classified as right-wing extremist(Ignazi 2003), the only relevant extreme-right party in Italy is the separatistLega Nord (LN) under the leadership of Umberto Bossi. The party is cur-rently a junior partner in the Berlusconi administration as the only WesternEuropean extreme-right party in government. After some internal crises andprogrammatic shifts, the LN has turned to counter-cosmopolitan identitypopulism (Betz 2002). Opposition to economic, cultural, and politicalglobalization has become its major campaign focus.7 While for the LNregionalist separatism and the fight “for the people of the North” remainsthe major objective, the Lega Nord per l’indipendenza della Padania contin-ues to support the creation of the fictional state of Padania and separationfrom southern Italy. It has adjusted its program accordingly, molding it intoits anti-Southern racism, which is also still characteristic for the party(Gomez-Reino Cachafeiro 2001).

Recently, the LN began to specifically target Muslim immigrants andillegals, responding and reinforcing current public discourses. It claims thatItalians live on a reservation like Native Americans, and calls for a stop ofthe invasion by immigrants (www.leganord.org). The party’s participationin government, its focus on identity politics, and the mobilization of newpopular resentments against globalization helped to regain electoral suc-cesses. After its modest reform and as a junior partner in government, theLN recovered from its poor electoral results of the early 2000s, receiving4.6% in the 2006 national parliamentary elections and 8.3% in 2008. Theparty’s radical opposition to cultural globalization is more modest in eco-nomic terms, but it is supplemented by strong anti-European Union state-ments, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and modernized antisemitism. The latter,however, is primarily limited to statements by politicians rather than evi-dent in party platforms and programs. On a local level, the party collabo-rates with the openly antisemitic, neo-Nazi Forza Nuova (www.eumc.eu.int2004; Caiani & Parenti 2009).

7. In the 1990s, Bossi began focusing on globalization, attacking “material-ism” and the ”evil high finance controlling all economic power by means of global-ization” as main enemies (Die Presse, October 20, 1999).


Austria

The Austrian radical right Freedom Party of Austria (FreiheitlichePartei Osterreiche—FPO), which was by far the most successful radicalright party in Western Europe and the second strongest party in the Austrianparliament, experienced electoral seesaws over the last ten years since itjoined the government as a junior partner in 2000. After its split into FPOand BZO (Bundnis Zukunft Osterreichs—Alliance for the Future of Aus-tria) and the departure of its charismatic populist leader Jorg Haider, theparty kept an ethnic-nationalist and antisemitic ideological profile. How-ever, popular opposition to the European Union in favor of “Austrian patri-otism” and “independence” (www.fpoe.at), populist calls for referenda, andanti-establishment rhetoric and economic national protectionism againstglobalization have also been its modernized ideological focal points formore than a decade.

In recent years, the FPO further focused its ideological message andeffectively responded to new issues while keeping some of its hard-lineideology. In the 2008 electoral campaign, it demanded a halt to immigra-tion, a ministry for repatriating foreigners, and the return of powers con-ceded to the European Union (www.fpoe.at). The party now mobilizespopular resentments, especially against Muslims (for instance, party leaderStrache campaigned for a ban on Islamic dress)8; it also articulates anti-imperialist anti-Americanism and antisemitism in global politics. By suchemphasis on both modernized anti-Muslim xenophobia and antisemitism,the party almost doubled its vote (www.elections2009-results.eu/en/aus-tria_en.html) in the European elections after a campaign “against EuropeanUnion accession of Turkey and Israel” (www.derstandard.at, May 21,2009).

To be sure, Israel has never been under consideration for candidacy.The combination of ethnic-nationalist populism and effective counter-cos-mopolitan mobilizations against the foreign forces Turkey and Zionismconsolidated the party’s electoral success (17.5% in the 2008 parliamentaryelections, in addition to 10.7% of the radical right competitor BZO).

The UK

The British National Party (BNP) has moved from the extremistfringes to becoming the first radical right party in British history to winseats in a national vote, namely, in the 2009 European elections. Agenda

8. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/3097540/Austria-election-delivers-gains-for-far-Right.html.


changes seem to have come to fruition here: The new success can beviewed as a reflection of its programmed modernization, trying to appearmore respectable (“suits not boots” strategy), and its reorientation toward acounter-cosmopolitan ideology. This entails a focus on protection ofnational identity, anti-European Union positions, opposition to theEurophiles and the hypocrisy of the liberal elite and its multicultural experi-ment, national economic and cultural protectionism against globalization,workfare instead of welfare, and—last but not least—an anti-immigrantpolicy outlook that especially targets Muslims (www.bnp.org.uk; Goodwin2007).

The undisputed party leader and chairman, Nick Griffin, attacks the“Islamification of the West”; Britain’s becoming an Islamic state or likeAfrica; Islamofascism; and the vicious faith of Islam (BBC News, July 162004; www.timesonline.co.uk, November 11, 2006). The party primarilycombines issues of inner security with anti-Muslim and anti-immigrantresentment, leading to apocalyptic scenarios such as: Europe is sooner orlater going to have to close its borders or it is simply going to be swampedby the Third World (www.bnp.org.uk). Yet, the party also attacks EuropeanUnion policy and the “European Union’s moves on Iran,” and the anti-imperialist dictatorship of the Islamic Republic. The BNP modernizes andat times downplays its antisemitism, but Griffin, for instance, has neverdistanced himself from his Holocaust denial—he refers to the Shoah as“Holohoax.”9

France

Similar transformations could be observed in case of the FrontNational (FN), the prototype of the new radical right. The FN has been themodel for many other European radical right parties because it was able torespond to, as well as frame and generate new issues and thereby modernizeits ideological image in a way that appealed to, new potential voters. In thepast, it was among the first to mobilize Euro-skepticism, address the repre-sentation crisis, launch attacks against immigration, and exploit anti-estab-lishment effects (Ignazi 2003, 95ff.). While the party’s anti-globalizationrhetoric and national protectionism, including protectionist economic poli-cies and attacks on multinational corporations, became conspicuous duringthe 1990s, it was relegated to a less prominent role in recent years. Today,antisemitism, in its overt or coded variations, is present but secondary in theFN and its campaigns. Still, party leader Jean-Marie Le Pen openly displays

9. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/austria/3097540/Austria-election-delivers-gains-for-far-Right.html.


his friendship with the actor Dieudonne M’bala M’bala and supports hisIslamic fundamentalist, anti-Israel, and antisemitic viewpoints.

The main issue for the FN today, however, is immigration. This domi-nant issue is linked to the “primacy of the French”(www.frontnational.com) in opposition to multicultural diversity, cosmo-politanism, new Muslim minorities, and cultural globalization. Though ithad long benefitted from its powerful party leader Le Pen, the party’s dra-matic loss in the 2007 election (4.29%) may be attributed to some programmodernizations initiated by his daughter Marine Le Pen. An anti-establish-ment campaign poster during the 2007 electoral campaign featuring animmigrant complaining about the “usual suspects of politics” may havebeen too much to swallow—and too much “modernization” of the partyimage for some of the FN right-wing core constituencies. Even if not cen-tral to the party’s recent campaigns, Holocaust relativity and antisemiticinnuendo remain an essential part of the party’s ideological fabric.

RESENTMENTS AND IDEOLOGY OF THE RADICAL RIGHT:COMPARATIVE FINDINGS

In sum, the comparative analysis of party ideologies and mobilizationsdiscloses a partly heterogeneous picture. Political contexts and context-dependent variables play a significant role, and campaigns are hardly uni-fied transnationally; in part, they respond to specific national issues andelectoral demands. Even though ideological priorities and mobilizationsvary, however, there are some prevalent ideological features that haveemerged, and that overall characterize the contemporary European radicalright.

First, all radical right parties share a high level of xenophobia and anti-immigrant resentment. Immigrants are blamed for all kinds of economicand social woes, as well as for a loss of cultural identity. In particular, thisresentment is currently often—though by no means exclusively—directedagainst Muslim immigrants and, depending on the country, specific ethnicminorities. Such resentment, which is intimately related to an opposition tocosmopolitan diversity, expresses an ethnic nationalism and collective self-understanding that remains a constitutive core feature of the European radi-cal right. There are, however, exceptions to the rule. In Eastern Europe,anti-Muslim prejudice plays only a marginal role, if any, in public mobiliza-tion of the radical right. Hungary’s Jobbik, the most successful radical rightparty in Europe, is predominantly antisemitic and also discriminates againstRom; Muslims are largely irrelevant in campaigns.

Second, several relevant European radical right parties, while retainingan ethnic-nationalist ideological profile, have also partly become transna-


tional in their outlook. They claim to defend a “Europe of nations” againstcosmopolitan influences and immigration; multinational corporations; andglobal political norms and institutions, including European Union govern-ance. Some parties develop a significantly modernized, radically counter-cosmopolitan, anti-globalization identity (Mudde 2007) that reflects wide-spread counter-sentiments in the electorate. The counter-cosmopolitandefense of cultural particularism includes, but is not limited to, nationalparticularism.

Third, and intimately related to the second feature, is that antisemitismremains a core element of radical right ideology, old and new. In severalcases, there is even a noticeable resurgence of antisemitism, at times codedin radical anti-Israel resentments, “world Zionism” or foreign influence, andconspiracy theories.10 Such antisemitic mobilizations are often directlylinked to the anti-globalization discourse, whereby Jews are identified asthe key agents of cosmopolitan cultural change, global power, and theglobal financial or economic system. Jews, once again, serve as a personi-fied, reified world explanation.

The demonstrable relevance and revival of antisemitism in radicalright ideology, to be sure, is at odds with popular perceptions of the radicalright. Moreover, some premature scholarly claims that antisemitism has vir-tually disappeared from new radical right mobilizations and as a mobilizingresource due to its allegedly bygone appeal, runs counter to our findings.Instead, we see the contours of an emerging, new ideological combinationthat couples domestic resentment against Muslims with hatred of Jews andopposition to cosmopolitan norms and the cosmopolitanization processes;in several cases, Israel, world Zionism, and Israel lobbies have become theprimary target in the radical right’s view of foreign affairs—an ideologythat engenders support for radical Islamist’s terror against Jews and Israelabroad, even though Muslim immigrants are not accepted as equal membersof society.

BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND: COUNTER-COSMOPOLITANISM, XENOPHOBIA,AND ANTISEMITISM

Before we explore several hypotheses to explain why such an ideologi-cal combination, and the resurgence of antisemitism in particular, may bean effective mobilizing tool in party systems of the contemporary EuropeanUnion, we have a close look at the changing political climate and theincreased popular demand for counter-cosmopolitan, xenophobic, andantisemitic politics. It is displayed in continuously widespread, in part

10. This should not be misunderstood as any kind of lexical ordering.


increasing resentments against Jews, Muslims, and immigrants; anincreased public and political salience of these subjects and related issues;and economic and socio-cultural globalization crises that tend to emboldenand help intensify previously existing antisemitic undercurrents, includingreified perceptions of globalization and the cosmopolitanization of societiesas “Jewish machinations.”

Increased Resentments

PEW data indicate a strong relationship between anti-Jewish and senti-ments against Muslim immigrants. Indeed, in six European countriesincluded in the PEW survey, the correlation between unfavorable opinionsof Jews and unfavorable opinions of Muslims is remarkably high (neg .80;PEW 2008). Overall, negative views of Muslims have increased over afour-year period; exceptions are Spain and Germany, where negative viewsof Muslims are nevertheless still high (52% and 50%, respectively).11

Moreover, there has been considerable progress in the cosmopolitanizationof European societies, i.e., the diversification of European societies and therecognition of cosmopolitan diversity and norms. Yet, there is still a consid-erable segment of the electorate that is hostile to immigrants and the soci-ocultural change they represent. Largely overlooked in public debates,antisemitism has surged and resurged in Europe since the turn of the cen-tury (see Table 2). Antisemitism is a far cry from being merely a historicallegacy. Instead, empirical data show that antisemitic attitudes remain anundercurrent—even if varying in scope and intensity—among parts ofEuropean societies. Not only that: suveys indicate that such resentments arenow more prevalent than in previous decades and they matter more to cer-tain segments of voters. Antisemitism, like xenophobia, is no marginalminority opinion at the fringe of society.

11. A 2009 study on group-focused enmity conducted by researchers from Uni-versity of Bielefeld in Germany finds, however, that hatred of Muslims to someextent decreased, while, according to this study, hatred of Jews and homosexuals isgrowing. The level of resentment against most minorities declined—sexism andracism even considerably, resentments against Muslims slightly, while the percent-age of people who believe “that there are too many Muslims” in their country isstill especially high in those countries that actually have a low percentage of Mus-lim minorities. According to the study, 41.2% of Europeans believe that “Jews tryto take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era,” and 45.7% ofrespondents supported the contention that Israel in general “is conducting a war ofextermination against the Palestinians,” thereby equating the Jewish state with thegenocidal Nazi regime and reverting colonial and Holocaust-related European guiltto the Jews (Stricker 2009).


TABLE 2: NEGATIVE VIEWS OF JEWS IN EUROPE SINCE 2004 (PERCENT).

Britain

Poland

Spain

France

Germany

50

45

40

35

30

25

20

15

10

0

5

2004 2005 2006 2007

20 20

9

25

36

46

39

32

27

2221

1316

66

119

Sources: PEW Global Attitudes Project (2008); Unfavourable Views of Jews andMuslims on the Increase in Europe (Washington, DC: PEW), http://www.pewglobal.org/2008/09/17/unfavorable-views-of-jews-and-muslims-on-the-increase-in-europe/.

On average, antisemitic attitudes have been on the rise in Europe since2000, although there are fluctuations and considerable cross-national varia-tions. Moreover, hatred of Israel and “Zionists” has become a medium toexpress hatred of Jews. Forms of radical anti-Zionism, wishing for thedestruction of the Jewish state and the de-Zionization of the world, mayalso be motivated by secondary antisemitism (Rensmann 1998): the desireto morally demonize Jews because they are living reminders of the Germanand European atrocities committed against them during the Nazi era. Equat-ing the Zionists with Nazis is a way to project one’s guilt and settle an oldscore. According to a seven-country survey, including the most populousEuropean member states, almost every second European (45.7%) uses Naziassociations and comparisons when thinking of Israel—i.e., they somewhator strongly agree that “Israel is conducting a war of extermination againstthe Palestinians,” while 37.4% agree that “considering Israel’s policy, I canunderstand why people do not like Jews” (Zick 2009, 13).

Increased Awareness

Antisemitism and hostility against Muslims have become more promi-nent issues to the public, in politics, and in modern media. The latter, anti-Muslim hostility, seems to benefit from certain media debates aboutmosques and the alleged introduction of Sharia law. In recent years, to be


sure, political and public discourse in Europe is also characterized by a highlevel of awareness and alertness in the face of anti-Muslim campaigns orstatements. For instance, a best-selling book by a former German politician,Thilo Sarrazin, which includes blatantly xenophobic, racialized anti-Muslimclaims, was subjected to scathing criticism across the German public and itspolitical class. After the terrorist acts by Anders Behring Breivik in Norwayin 2011, this public debate about anti-Muslim hostility reached a new peak,and anti-Muslim radical right groups such as Stop the Islamization of Nor-way (Stopp islamiseringen av Norge—SIAN) have come under renewed,particular public scrutiny. Anti-Muslim resentments have increasinglybecome scandalized in European publics, and at least parties associatedwith anti-immigrant or anti-Muslim resentments have recently lost electoralsupport—for example, the national populist Progress Party of Norway hassuffered significant losses in local elections in the aftermath of the Breivik’sacts of terror.12

However, while the public focus has shifted on anti-Muslimprejudices—which remains a controversial subject from which the radicalright might draw long-term gains—radical right parties can also benefitfrom an increasingly legitimate public discourse that is hostile to Jews. Thisaspect has been neglected in recent research: We observe an expandingzone of acquiescence in relation to antisemitism, which also finds reflectionin the radical right, that has hardly been recognized yet in research on thesubject. This increased legitimacy or public tolerance of anti-Jewish resent-ment is characterized by changing boundaries in what is a respectable con-versation about Jews and Zionists. It also finds expression in the rise ofconspiracy theories, which often directly lead to a reservoir of antisemiticimages of Jews allegedly pulling the strings and controlling the world. Fur-thermore, antisemitism is also nurtured by a popular Manichean world view

12. On the one hand, some critics of Islam in European public discourse tend toconflate political Islamism with private religious practices and downplay existingracist discrimination against Muslim immigrants. On the other hand, many criticsof Islamophobia conflate these distinctions as well by suggesting that all criticismof Islamism and of Islamic rule is illegitimate, prejudiced, and driven by hatred—including criticism from Muslims and secularized citizens with Muslim backgroundwho oppose pious interpretations of Islam in Europe and abroad. In this logic,which centers on blasphemy rather than the discrimination of individuals and theviolation of individual rights, the Islamophobia charge has also been misused. Itcan function as a sweeping brush against dissidents criticizing the discrimination ofwomen and gays in the name of Islam, or of radical Islamists’ genocidal antisemit-ism. In its most extreme version, it is used by radical Islamists to block off criticismof anti-gay, anti-feminist and antisemitic statements by claiming that such criticismwould be Islamophobic.


that is not necessarily antisemitic in itself but helps create a climate of anti-Jewish hostility, and has increasingly gained traction in European publics. Itportrays the two countries in which most of the world’s Jews live, theUnited States and Israel, as the main—if not the only—villains of worldpolitics and of the world economy, while letting brutal dictatorships andrepressive regimes across the world off the hook. Anti-Israel sentiments andanti-Zionism that go far beyond criticism of the Israeli government and itspolicies are in most cases no longer discredited as illegitimate resentmentsagainst another group or country but have become a badge of honor evenamong publicists and politicians on the left who otherwise tend to supportanti-discrimination policies and universal human rights (Hirsh 2007; Mar-kovits 2011; Rensmann/Schoeps 2011; Wistrich 2010).

In its radical version, this Manichean world view manifests itself inpublicly articulated stereotypes about war-mongering Zionists and a glob-ally powerful Israel lobby that dominates governments and stifles freedebate about Israel’s atrocities against innocent peoples, especially thePalestinians. Such claims go hand in hand with a wide-spread immunizationstrategy in the form of antisemitism denial that reaches deep into the publicand the political left; in this view, antisemitism today is a generality rele-vant only insofar as it is seen as a spurious charge that the Zionists or thepro-Israel lobby would throw at critics of Israel (Hirsh 2007, 73). Flankedby the claim that criticism of Israel cannot be antisemitic (cited in Hirsh2007) and the belief that if there is any antisemitism it is Israel that causesits emergence,13 there are highly emotionalized boycott campaigns acrossEurope exclusively directed against the Jewish state. These campaigns areemboldened by widely popular charges that Israel is an apartheid regimethat deserves to be dismantled.14 Singling out Israel as the pariah among thenations, such aggressive demonization of the Jewish state goes far beyond

13. Of course, criticism of Israeli policies does not have to be antisemitic. Oftenit is not. There can, however, be antisemitic “criticism” of Israel, just as there canbe racist criticisms of African or Arab countries. It is equally implausible, andprejudiced, to claim that an African regime is the “cause” for racist perceptions ofAfricans as it is to say that Israel is the “cause” for antisemitic perceptions of Jews.

14. Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis, who constitute 20% of the nation’s mul-ticultural citizenry and is equally represented at Israeli universities, have the samecivil and political rights as Jews and Christians (unlike Palestinians in Syria, forinstance). Israel hardly resembles the South African apartheid regime with which itis often compared. It is, in fact, a safe haven for Arab gays and religious minoritiessuch as the Baha’i. Most striking is the double standard of the “apartheid” charge,which indicates more than a biased predisposition: countries that systematicallydiscriminate against, indeed persecute, ethnic and religious minorities and violatehuman rights, such as Iran or Sudan, are not subjected to similar boycottcampaigns.


any rational criticism, and the simultaneous denial of the problem ofantisemitism is not limited to the radical right. Anti-Israel demonstrationsresonate in public segments across the political spectrum and in civil soci-ety, including left-wing student and teacher unions and media. More oftenthan not, such aggressive anti-Zionism slips into overt antisemitic stereo-types and resentment. For instance, the left-leaning British newspaper theGuardian recently published an article in which journalist Deborah Orrclaimed that the Israel-Hamas prisoner swap—Hamas released the capturedsoldier Gilat Shalit in exchange for the release of 1,000 Palestinians respon-sible for the death of 600 Israelis, most of the victims women and chil-dren—gave evidence that Israel nurtures a supremacist Jewish self-understanding of being a “chosen” people whose lives are worth a thousandtimes the lives of others (Orr 2011).15

There is, at any rate, a noticeable erosion of more rigorous discursiveboundaries—about what is tolerated as part of public discourse and what isclassified or scandalized as hate speech—with regard to Jews and Zionists,boundaries that had evolved in postwar Europe. The most recent indicatorof antisemitism’s renewed public toleration, if not legitimacy, is the factthat the extreme nationalist, radical right LAOS party, with its chairman,Georgios Karatzaferis, is part of the new Greek coalition government thatwas established in response to the European debt crisis. LAOS, claiming torepresent the “true Greeks” instead of “Jews, homosexuals, and Commu-nists,” particularly campaigns against Jews and Israel. The party received7% of the vote in the last national election. Karatzaferis is a professed Hol-ocaust denier who hates Israel and is known for his openly antisemitic state-ments. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, he posed the question: “Whywere all the Jews warned not to come to work that day?” before the Greekparliament. Karatzaferis also questions the “tales of Auschwitz andDachau.” During Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008, Karatzaferis saidthat the IDF was acting “with savage brutality only seen in Hitler’s timetowards helpless people” (Uni 2011).

15. In this case, the editor of the Guardian was forced to publish an unusual“apology” three weeks later, in which he recognizes that “‘Chosenness,’ in Jewishtheology, tends to refer to the sense in which Jews are ‘burdened’ by religiousresponsibilities; it has never meant that the Jews are better than anyone else. Histor-ically it has been antisemites, not Jews, who have read ‘chosen’ as code for Jewishsupremacism.”


Crises of Globalization

Crises of globalization have provided a fertile climate for mobiliza-tions of resentments against immigrants and Jews that portray them asresponsible for social problems. Personifying the origins of theses crises inimmigrants, foreign capital, and particularly Jews, the radical right can tapinto—and strengthen the link between—existing social resentments andcurrent multifaceted crises of global modernity. In particular, the identifica-tion of Jews with globalism and cosmopolitan political, economic, andsocio-cultural transformations corresponds to what we call counter-cosmo-politanism, that is, the generalized, particularistic opposition to the com-bined set of political, cultural, and economic transformations associatedwith globalization and cosmopolitan value change (Markovits andRensmann 2010; Rensmann 2011; Rensmann & Miller 2010).16

Counter-cosmopolitanism, as the unqualified rejection of all forms ofsociocultural, economic and political globalization as well as cosmopolitannorms and diversity, is likely to become more prevalent during crises ofglobalization. Counter-cosmopolitan parties, which generally opposeglobalization and the cosmopolitanization of society (Beck and Grande2007), seek to strategically mobilize those citizens who identify with thenational community, citizens from economic strata that have traditionallybeen protected by the nation-state and now find themselves increasinglyexposed to foreign competition, and those who lack the cultural competenceto meet the economic and cultural challenge of a globalizing world (Kriesiet al. 2006).

While counter-cosmopolitanism bolsters hostility against immigrantsand cultural change, it particularly predisposes toward hostility againstJews. As a form of a reified critique of globalization, such generalizedcounter-cosmopolitanism is highly susceptible to conspiracy theories thatinvoke the old social image of the cosmopolitan, wandering Jew. Inantisemitic narratives, Jews have traditionally been identified with moder-nity, cosmopolitanism, and globalism. Jews or Zionists are now oftencharged with cosmopolitan social change, global wars, and global domina-tion, cultural diffusion, the global erosion of the nation-state, dual loyalty,and capitalist crises. It is, after all, one of modern antisemitism’s distinctfeatures to function as an objectified explanation of the modern world. Inthis ideology, Jews are seen as the embodiment of these cultural and eco-

16. This rejection is part and parcel of, but not limited to, nationalistic attitudes;it can also entail religiously or culturally grounded motivations, and it can beexpressed transnationally in its own organizational outreach or political alliance-building.


nomic modernization processes (including immigration), and as the oneswho orchestrate them. In a world of abstract domination-governed complex,abstract, and anonymous social relations, the antisemites present theworld’s problems as a Zionist scheme. The widespread uneasiness in thechanging world society of postmodernity and in the global village cantherefore be projected onto the image of Jews. Even if such projection is notframed as a global Jewish conspiracy, global problems are often squarelyblamed on the Zionists and their allegedly disproportionate Jewish politicaland media influence through powerful, secret Israel lobbies and Holocaustindustries ruling politics domestically and in world affairs.

CONCLUSION

Based on an analysis of contemporary radical right party platforms andmobilizations, we have shown that there is continuity and change in thepolitical ideology of relevant radical right parties in Europe: a focus on anti-immigration issues and anti-Muslim resentment is accompanied by virulentantisemitism. Contrary to common perceptions, this antisemitism remainsan integral part of the radical right’s political identity and mobilizations.While anti-Muslim resentments often matter, the claim that antisemitismhas been “replaced” by other resentments cannot be substantiated; it isequally invalid that the European radical right has largely turned pro-Israel(Bunzl 2007). Instead, most of the radical right prominently features mod-ernized, “anti-globalist,” and “anti-Zionist” antisemitism. Cross-nationalvariations notwithstanding, antisemitism has gained in importance. This isespecially the case among the most successful radical right parties in East-ern and Western Europe, such as Jobbik (Hungary), LAOS (Greece), andFPO (Austria), in many instances, radical right parties cater to broadercounter-cosmopolitan constituencies. Thus, a modernized ideological pro-file tends to emerge: it combines xenophobic resentment against immigrantsand European Muslims with a counter-cosmopolitan agenda and antisemit-ism domestically, as well as modernized anti-Zionist antisemitism in for-eign affairs. Even though Muslim immigrants are rejected domestically,radical Islamists may hereby gain radical right sympathies for their struggleagainst world Zionism.

These mobilizations and transformations on the radical right supplyside are supported by a set of favorable conditions. Radical right partiesexpress an evident electoral demand by catering to significant counter-cos-mopolitan constituencies that harbor resentments against social and culturalchange in general, and immigrants and Jews in particular. Moreover, theybenefit from a broader European public climate in which certain anti-immi-grant resentments surface, and in which especially forms of modernized


antisemitism (Rensmann and Schoeps 2011) have become increasinglyrespectable and tolerated. Finally, the radical right is one of several agentsthat seeks to exploit current European and globalization crises that affectEuropean citizens, such as the European financial debt crisis, and that feedinto persisting anti-Jewish undercurrents and conspiracy theories. These cri-ses can also be seen as crises of cosmopolitanism that help engendercounter-cosmopolitan responses, including hostility against immigrants andJews.

The radical right’s resurgent and reloaded politics of paranoia inEurope find a special target in Jews and Zionists. The new and modernizedradical right, emulating the old, hereby plays its part in an emerging newinternational antisemitism. In particular, the often neglected, and at timesdenied, revival of antisemitism in radical right party ideology and beyondepitomizes, both on the political demand and supply side, what can be con-ceived of as situated in a deeper political crisis in Europe. The broaderresurgence of antisemitism can be theorized as an anti-modern, counter-cosmopolitan response to rapid economic and cultural change and currentcrises in the 21st century. Part and parcel of—but far from being limitedto—the radical right, there are indicators that this reaction has begun tomove from the fringes into the center.

*Lars Rensmann, PhD, is DAAD assistant professor at the Department of PoliticalScience, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. His recent publications includePolitics and Resentment (Boston & Leiden: Brill, 2011), ed. with Julius H.Schoeps, and Gaming the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010),with Andrei S. Markovits.

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Weiss, Hilde. 2003. “A Cross-National Comparison of Nationalism in Austria, theCzech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, and Poland,” Political Psychology 24(2): 377-401.

Weitzman, Mark. 2006. “Antisemitismus und Holocaust-Leugnung: PermanenteElemente des globalen Rechtsextremismus.” In GlobalisierterRechtsextremismus? Die extremistische Rechte in der Ara der Globalisierung,edited by Thomas Greven and Thomas Grumke, 52-69 (Wiesbaden: VSVerlag fur Sozialwissenschaften).

———. 2010. Magical Logic: Globalization, Conspiracy Theory, and the Shoah,sicsa.huji.ac.il/weitzman.pdf.

Zick, Andreas, et al. 2009. European Conditions. Findings of a Study on Group-Focused Enmity in Europe (Berlin: Amadeu Antonio Stiftung/UniversitatBielefeld).

Operation Mural and Morocco’s Jewish Children

David G. Littman*

In November 1960, as a British citizen, I was newly established withmy wife in Lausanne, Switzerland, where I began reading William Shirer’sRise and Fall of the Third Reich. It led me to ask the following questions:“What could a Jew, living in a neutral country like Sweden or Switzerlandduring World War II, have done to help Jews?” “What can I do for Jews indistress right now?”

I knew of the plight of Jews in Arab lands after the birth of Israel,when hundreds of thousands were forced—or felt obliged—to leave theirnative countries. Like 25,000 others, my wife, Gisele, had fled Egypt a yearafter the Suez War in the wake of the Free Officers’ Revolt.

I volunteered my services to all international Jewish organizations inGeneva, but there was no enthusiasm until I reached my last door. There,Professor Jacques Bloch, the director of an organization for Jewish children(OSE), had received a visit two days earlier from the Jewish Agency’s rep-resentative, Naftali Bargiora, who was looking for a volunteer to arrangeSwiss holidays for Jewish children from Morocco—and from there toIsrael. After meeting Bargiora, I quickly accepted this fascinating mission,to be called Operation Mural (after my code name, “Mural”).

The 1961 story of Operation Mural was first chronicled in the Israelinewspaper Maariv, from a chapter in Shmuel Segev’s 1984 book on Opera-tion Yakhin. That led to a public recognition by Chaim Herzog, then presi-dent of Israel, followed by the Mimouna award (1986), which Gisele and Ireceived from then Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres before tens ofthousands.

A week later, a meeting was arranged in Tel Aviv for us to meet 120of “our” children. It was an incredibly moving experience, and joy filled the

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room, with music. We were able to maintain contact with a few—two ofwhom were interviewed for the film Operation Mural: Casablanca 1961some twenty years later.

On June 1, 2008, a special commemorative ceremony was held inPresident Shimon Peres’s Jerusalem residence. Alongside former Mossadcontacts and family members, Mr. Peres stated:

Well, it is a belated ceremony, but it doesn’t lose its value, because whatyou did stands on its own legs and is not affected by time. I think that thesaving of 530 children is, I imagine, the most moving experience a mancan have. You say in Hebrew: “The one who saves one life is like the onethat saved the life of the whole world.” But when you save 530 children,it’s really unforgettable. I want to express, on behalf of our people [and]our nation, our recognition of your courage, your wisdom, of your deter-mination under extremely difficult conditions at a time when our connec-tions were extremely weak [with Morocco]. And I must say, whenever Iread again the story, I am moved to see the ingenuity and the courage thatyou have shown, and the results. So, thanks to it we have 530 people,families, [and] children alive, and it’s unique because in North Africa ourconnections were even weaker than in Europe, and the ground was lessknown And, I think, if you wouldn’t do it, it wouldn’t be done. In orderto do it, you were in touch with the Mossad and I wish to express appre-ciation [to] the Mossad for all the performance, your activities, undercover, and [the] successful result.

On July 1, 2009, I received the Mossad Hero of Silence Order withthese words: “An order of highest esteem and appreciation awarded to aclandestine warrior, who risked his life and who served a sacred cause ofthe People and of the State of Israel.”

REMARKS AT THE PRESENTATION CEREMONY

Efraim Halevy (Mossad chief, 1998-2002), chairman of the IsraelIntelligence Heritage and Commemoration Center (MLM), Glilot, Tel Aviv,recounts the operation’s place in Israel’s history in his very revealing pres-entation on July 1, 2009, just before I spoke and the prestigious Order wasconferred on me:

It [was] an operation which took place on the background of a crisiswhich had its origin in the entire operation of bringing the Jews out ofMorocco. It was an operation which took place at the time when tensionin Morocco was rising, when the Algerian-Moroccan war was beginningto take a very ominous character. Within a couple of years of this opera-tion, Morocco was involved in a war with Algeria. Israel and Israelisplayed a role in this war—far away from the shores of Israel—probably

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the first time in the history of the State of Israel that Israel began tofunction and to behave like a strategic power.

Halevy then provided a very revealing personal analysis:

But this operation related to the rescue of Jews, a function which isunique in the history of the international intelligence community. Noother intelligence community—no other intelligence organization in theworld—has ever been involved in rescue operations, mass rescue opera-tions of people, because basically the rescue of people, of masses of peo-ple, of large numbers of peoples, contradicts the very principle ofintelligence activity, especially in enemy country—especially in hostileenvironments. Normally, when intelligence operations were carried out, itis essential, it is a rule that you do not expose yourself with your identityto your environment. You don’t make contacts, unnecessary contactswith people around you. You certainly don’t reveal the nature of whatyour mission is—not only 10, 20, 50, 100, hundreds of people, but youdon’t reveal your mission to anybody. When we come to rescue opera-tions, you cannot operate that way; you have to reveal your identity topeople around you, and when you’re in enemy country you have toexpose yourself to hundreds of people at various points, at various stagesof your activities. This was the way it has been in Iraq, this was the wayit was in Morocco, this was the way it was in Syria, and Iran, and Ethio-pia, and in Sudan. And the Israeli intelligence community operated foryears in these environments at great risk—at enormous risk for the peo-ple involved in these operations. Moreover, we don’t usually recruit vol-unteers for these operations. Normally, these operations were carried outby people who served in the Mossad as intelligence officers, who hadexperience in intelligence activities, who know how to create contacts,who know how to use various types of equipment, who have a back-ground, and, who come from a family of activities which are directlyconnected to the vision that they have to accomplish. In the case of res-cue operations, very often the people who were recruited for these opera-tions were not members of the Mossad, were not officers of the Mossad,very often [they were] volunteers. The risk in operating such an operationwas very great, it was a risk taken by the commander . . . but it was also avery, very grave risk taken by the people who volunteered—and one suchvolunteer was David Gerald Littman, who had no experience at all inintelligence activities, who had no experience at all. [ . . . ]

I believe that, in awarding this award to David Gerald Littman, weare bestowing upon him a very, very distinct and a very, very uniquehonor. But, in his coming here, after so many years, to accept this award,I think he is bestowing something very unique upon us. The realization,once again, of the solidarity of the people of Israel throughout the worldis not an empty phrase. It’s something very real, it’s something very con-crete and it’s something which, in the end, continues an immense contri-bution to perpetuating the people of Israel and the State of Israel.


Much moved by these words, I declared:

I am truly overwhelmed by what I have heard now and wish to expressmy profoundest thanks and deep gratitude to all those in the MLM [ . . . ]for their decision to confer on me this prestigious award and great honorfor a humanitarian mission in Morocco forty-eight years ago. We shallcherish this moment forever. [ . . . ]

I wish to say now a few words on the history of North AfricanJewry, which offers us a profound lesson in courage, perseverance andmoral force, in spite of constant humiliation and discrimination [that]lasted well into the 20th century in Morocco. It ended only in 1912 withthe French Protectorate, when the dhimmi system was abolished, wherebyeven the Chief Rabbi of Fez, Vidal Sarfaty, had to go barefoot on leavingthe mellah [the Jewish quarter] as described in a 1911 document that Ipublished in 1975. [ . . . ]

After Israel’s rebirth, approximately 92,000 Moroccan Jews madetheir aliyah [return to Israel] before the gates were closed in 1956, soonafter Morocco’s independence. Clandestine departures continued, butsomewhat haphazardly. Contacts by the Mossad with the new king’s rep-resentatives were only beginning when I reached Casablanca on March16, 1961, as a delegate of an international children’s organization, OSE,renamed OSSEAN [Oeuvre Suisse de Secours aux Enfants de l’Afriquedu Nord].

OTHER REMARKS ABOUT OPERATION MURAL:

I made the following comments about Operation Mural on otheroccasions:

That was two months after the illegal immigrant ship Egoz had capsized,killing 44 Moroccan Jews, half of them children. The gates of immigra-tion from Morocco were then closed. I arrived in Casablanca on March16 and Gisele on the 31, and in early May I brought out our five-month-old daughter, Diana. Our family “cover” as a normal Christian familywas now complete, with me as OSSEAN’s emissary. We stayed at theAnfa, the city’s prime hotel, and I soon developed contacts with key peo-ple in administrative circles, among them a senior official in Morocco’ssecurity services. Concurrently, I had clandestine meetings with my “con-tacts,” Gad Shahar and Pinhas Katzir, and, on the last evening of Opera-tion Mural, July 23, 1961, with the head of the Mossad in Morocco, AlexGatmon. I also worked with members of the misgueret, young Jewsrecruited to help their community to immigrate to Israel.

Our goal was clear: to obtain government authorization for anyMoroccan children to attend summer camps in Switzerland. With theassistance of the misgueret, I began drawing up lists for collective grouppassports as the Moroccan authorities preferred, rather than for individual

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child passports (as preferred by the Jewish Agency). The authoritiesagreed to prepare a list of Muslim children from families of the Martyrsof the Moroccan independence. Between June 26 and July 24, 1961, 530Jewish children, some as young as seven, left for Switzerland in fiveconvoys and later reached Israel.

Operation Mural was soon followed by Operation Yakhin, in whichnearly 100,000—entire families, the young and the old—reached Israelbetween 1962 and 1964, using the same agreed system of “collectivepassports,” this time with the king’s approval, after negotiations with theMossad.

CLOSING REMARKS

I ended my presentation on receiving the Hero of Silence Order withthese thoughts:

Looking back, I can truly say that the best decision I ever made in my lifewas to marry my wife, Gisele, and the second best was to volunteer tobring out Jewish children from Morocco to Israel, via Switzerland. OurCasablanca mission remains indelible in our minds, as will this unforget-table moment here.

In conclusion, I wish to quote those inspiring words of the prophetJeremiah:

“Behold, I will bring them from the north country and gather themfrom the coasts of the earth, and with them the blind and the lame, thewoman with child . . .: a great company shall return thither. They shallcome with weeping, and with supplications will I lead them . . . . Andthere is hope in thine end, saith the Lord; that thy children shall comeagain to their own border” [31:8-9].

Yes, the children of Israel have returned to “to their own border”—to the Land of Israel—and the long history of Moroccan Jewry is a spe-cial part of Israel’s unique saga, achieved with much tears, pain, and suf-fering, but also with joy and hope, and great expectations over the ages.

The Casablanca mission remains indelibly in my mind. When I thinkof those days, let me say from my heart in simple Hebrew: Toda raba laMalam—Many thanks to the MLM.

Operation Mural could not have been successful without the assistanceof many others in different fields, especially Alex Gatmon and his wife,Carmit, in Morocco. I also gratefully acknowledge support from the head ofthe Mossad in Israel (Isser Harel) and his deputy, Shmulik Toledano; fromEfraim Ronel in Paris; from my Casablanca “contacts”: Gad Shahar andPinhas Katsir; and from Hubert Korshia, the head of the misgueret, and hiswife, Miriam. Naftali Bargiora and the Jewish Agency were involved fromthe start, as was Youth Aliyah, with Moshe Kol as its head.


*David G. Littman’s role in Operation Mural is presented in the documentary filmOperation Mural: Casablanca 1961 and in Shmuel Segev’s book OperationYakhim. Littman is now working on a detailed and documented narrative, retellingthe story as it occurred 50 years ago.

Jerusalem or al-Quds?:The European Union’s Choice

Bat Ye’or*

The overwhelming effect of the international campaign of defamationand delegitimization of Israel does not easily allow identifying where theblows come from, nor its original source. Yet the operations and strategiccenter of this widespread war that seeks to replace Jerusalem with al-Qudsis the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which brings togetherMuslim countries and those with a Muslim majority.

Created in 1969, this gigantic multinational religious organizationdeclares that it is rooted in the Koran and Sunna. It includes a large numberof subsidiary committees as well as various organizations embracing theo-logical, legal, and political sectors. Since 2000, the OIC stated in manydocuments that its mission is to speak for the Ummah, the worldwide Mus-lim community, which also includes those Muslims who emigrated to theWest. It claims to be their protector, with a particular responsibility towardthose living in Europe, since they are exposed to the immoral customs andideas of non-Muslims. The OIC constantly castigates these customs andideas as “Islamophobia,” making every effort to have it penalized in theinternational courts and by European governments. Countless internationalnetworks of multiculturalism, pro-immigration, and anti-Zionism, financedby European governments and the European Union, are totally devoted to itand act as its sounding board within Western societies. Those promoting theline blaming the West and the victimization of the Palestinians feed from itssap. In Europe its lobbies spread its arguments, and benefit in the universi-ties and at the international level from maximum media exposure as they

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operate with the tacit approval of European governments and churches,which provide them with unofficial, opaque financing.1

This Euro-OIC cooperation takes place through countless dialogue net-works, partnerships, and associations that preach diversity and multicul-turalism and that generally invoke the noble motives of “peace, justice andhuman rights.” Drawn from human rights platitudes, these ideals incorpo-rate the principles of Jihad and dhimmitude, imperceptible for a Europeanpublic unaware of them.

The subversion of the language and the twisting of its meaning areparticularly apparent in the OIC’s declarations. For example, the foreignministers of the member states of the OIC, meeting in New York in Sep-tember 2008, reiterated in their final communique “their commitment to thenoble principles of peace, humanism and tolerance” to democracy andtransparency, while most of their governments are among the cruelest andmost corrupt dictatorships. They declared that the challenges of the 21stcentury required the solidarity of the OIC member states, rallying round thevalues of Islam.2 Yet, no country that applies shari’a applies democracyand religious freedom as understood in the West. Less than three yearslater, the Arab masses were rising against the repression of the regimesrepresented by those same ministers, whose empty speeches slip into ready-made phrases to seduce Western leaders.

So while these governments promote genocidal jihad against Israel andnever condemn the massacres of their non-Muslim and Muslim subjects,their foreign ministers emphasize the paramount importance of protectingcultural and religious diversity, greater freedom of speech, and mutual tol-erance and understanding between peoples of different cultures and reli-gions in order to advance the harmony of peace, freedom, and legal rights(§11). The final communique gave assurances that “this diversity should notbe a source of conflicts; but rather a source of mutual enrichment and dia-logue between the religions, cultures and civilizations.” Despite the respectexpressed for diversity, tribal wars, fanaticism, suicide bombings, and relig-ious hate provoked by the governments of these ministers have been ram-pant throughout the countries of the OIC, including Turkey, which occupiesKurdish lands and part of Cyprus.

1. On this subject, see the files prepared by Gerald Steinberg, NGO Monitor,http:/www.ngomonitor.org/index.php, and the French detailed file “Souverainetesous condition. L’ampleur du soutien des gouvernements etrangers a des organiza-tions politiques en Israel,” in Controverses, no. 15 (Paris: Editions de l’Eclat,November 2010), 227-323.

2. “Final Communique of the Annual Coordination Meeting of Ministers ofForeign Affairs of the OIC Member States,” United Nations Headquarters, NewYork, September 26, 2008, OIC/ACM-08/FC/FINAL, §4.

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The conference called for the immediate freeing of the Libyan AbdulBaset Ali al-Megrahi, convicted of the murder of 270 people in the terroristattack that exploded on board Pan Am flight 103 over the village of Lock-erbie in Scotland on December 21, 1988. The conference also declared itscomplete solidarity with Omar Hassan al-Bashir, president of Sudan, who,according to the OIC, was unjustly accused by the International CriminalCourt (2009 and 2010) of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and geno-cide as part of the Khartoum regime’s jihad wars in Sudan. The intangibleand sacred nature of jihad explains the disagreements between justice basedon the principles of Western jurisprudence and those based on the criteria ofshari’a that govern the OIC. Allowing for the European Union’s policy ofglobalization and cross-cultural mixing, which has erased the historical, the-ological, and legal specificities of the Muslim world, these distinctions arehardly noticed by Europeans. Hence, the conference, basing itself upon thesanctity and laws of jihad, which promote striking fear in the heart of infi-dels by sudden and indiscriminate attacks, insisted that terrorism totallycontradicts the peaceful nature and teachings of Islam, which exhorts toler-ance, forgiveness, and non-violence (§135). Such position assumes thatinfidelity being itself, in essence, an aggression against Islam, Muslimdefense is called “resistance” rather than “terrorism.”

These few comments introduce us to the ambiguities of human rights,its abuse of language, and the cracks in justice through the willful ignoranceof the inherent contradictions in different and even opposing ethicalsystems.

In its anti-Israel obsession, the OIC is supported and often inspired bythe strategies of the pro-Islamists and senior European Union diplomats,only too happy to make available their skills and their countless anti-Israelplatforms. After the OIC declared that the Palestinian question was thesupreme cause of the Muslim world,3 Europe also hastened to adopt thispath. This provides for the Palestinization of the cultural, social, and aboveall political life of Europe. This OIC position was repeated at its meeting inNew York in 2008, where the Foreign Ministers of the member states,referring to Jerusalem, “reaffirmed the centrality of the cause of al-Quds al-Sharif for the entire Islamic Ummah,”4 thereby releasing among EuropeanUnion strategists the motor for a delegitimization campaign against Israel.

3. The Islamic Conference summit meeting in Mecca (January 1981) declaredthat, “The Palestinian should be viewed as the paramount issue of the Muslimnation”; cf. extracts from the summit in Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arabic Axis(Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), app. 4, 84.

4. “Final Communique,” §20 (italics in the original).


For three decades, Europe, servilely imitating the OIC, has effectivelycreated for itself a major problem that is eating away and destroying it. Thispathology is Palestine, which it made the hub of its international policy,transforming it into a symbol of peace and universal harmony in a worldthat would not know “justice” until its coming. The only obstacle to thisparadise is the Machiavellian Israel, the oppressor and usurper of Palestine,whose purity as a peaceful victim is the harbinger of global justice. Forforty years this logic has governed perceptions of the Israeli-Arab conflict.Any argument that contradicts it provokes a pathological hatred, while Pal-estinian-European correctness, totally resistant to both evidence and reason,rejects its author as a pariah.

Europe does not yet dare use armed force against Israel, whose exis-tence it claims to defend, while advising it to commit suicide. Europe fightsIsrael with the infamous Nazi weapons of delegitimization, defamation,propaganda, hatred, and attempts to destroy its economy through boycotts,disinvestment, and sanctions (BDS). Toward this goal it encourages aninternational campaign of incitement to hatred by financing anti-IsraelNGOs and lobbies. Europe claims that Jewish existence in its ancestralhomeland, Judea, and in Samaria is an “occupation,” a colonization. Israelhas in this way become a state that is occupying its own historical home-land; in Orwellian language, propagandists speak of “the Israeli occupationof Palestinian land” that is called Judea, and not of the ethnic and religiouscleansing of Jews from their homeland through wars, expulsions, disposses-sion, and the dehumanizing ruling of dhimmitude. Euro-jihadists invoke“Palestinian resistance”—not a terrorism that has spread throughout theplanet. The European Union has used every stratagem to force Israel to self-destruct in the name of Palestine, which would lead to an era of “justice andpeace” in the world in the same way the charnel houses of Auschwitz weremeant to purify humanity from Jews.

I want to recall here the three main steps that led to the Palestinizationprocess of Europe, in line with the desires of the OTC:

1. The Declaration of the Nine in November 1973, where for the firsttime the European community decided that part of the Jordanianpeople were an Arab Palestinian people, distinct from the Jordani-ans. It recognized Arafat—arch-terrorist and henchman ofEgypt—as their sole President for Life, and demanded that Israelwithdraw to the indefensible 1947-48 armistice lines. France hadconcocted this position several years earlier and had succeeded inimposing it on the Community of Nine, notwithstanding the reser-vations of certain countries, including Holland, that deemed itimmoral. On the Arab side, this initiative followed the conditionslaid down by the Arab League for accepting a European rap-


prochement policy. On the European side, it continued the tradi-tional antisemitic, anti-Zionist policy of World War II set by thosewho conceived and carried out the Shoah, and their collaborators,discreetly maintained in their positions in the postwar period.Within this setting the unofficial Euro-Arab dialogue started.5

2. The London Declaration in June 1977, reaffirming with evengreater authority the same position as that of the Nine, who hadbeen vexed by the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Treaty (1977-79),which—despite all their efforts—they were unable to derail.

3. The Venice Declaration in June 1980, particularly severe towardIsrael and offered as a consolation to the Arab countries furious atEgypt’s defection and Europe’s failure. Faced with the reduced oilsupply as a result of the Khomeini revolution of 1979, Europetried to convince the Arabs to increase production. The moral ofthe transaction: Israel versus oil required that the State of Israel bedemonized.

These declarations were issued to mitigate Palestinian internationalterrorism in Europe, to protect European interests in the Middle East, and todelete the black pages of colonization of Arab countries. Even though thesethree declarations were purported to be highly moral, they in fact punishedIsrael for not having let itself be overwhelmed by the armies of three Arabcountries that sought to eliminate it in 1967—Egypt, Syria, and Jordan,allied to Arab bands within the country. These countries continued NaziEuropean antisemitic policy, justified solely by European economic and oilinterests. Such were the foundation and motives behind the European policytoward Israel. Posing as a doxa based upon morality and peace, Europe,wrapped in a specious ethic, tried to impose it lock, stock, and barrel uponIsrael.

The Venice Declaration of June 1980 anticipated that of the Islamicsummit in Fez in September 1980 and of the OIC meeting in Mecca inJanuary 1981, which bound Muslim countries to impose a political and eco-nomic boycott on countries with embassies in al-Quds al-Sharif, Jerusalem

5. We note in particular Walter Hallstein, an officer in the Wehrmacht, whounder Konrad Adenauer reached the very highest positions of state and had a lead-ing influence in the Foreign Ministry. He became first president of the EuropeanCommission (1957-67) and remained an influential politician until his death inMarch 1982; Hans Globke, co-author of the Nuremberg racist laws, a minister ofChancellor Adenauer and his eminence grise in the postwar period. On the Frenchside, Vichy ministers and diplomats quietly continued their career in postwarFrance.


for Jews and Christians. This Mecca Islamic summit recommended thefollowing:

• Confirming commitment of the Islamic states to the LiberationArab al-Quds to become the capital of the independent Palestinianstate, and rejecting any situation that may prejudice full Arab sov-ereignty over the city.

• Confirming the commitment of Muslim states to utilize all theirpotentialities to oppose the Israeli decision to annex al-Quds;endorsing the decision to impose a political and economic boycotton those states that recognized the Israeli decision, contributing toits implementation; or setting up embassies in al-Quds al-Sharif.

• Inviting all countries to respect international legitimacy byabstaining from dealing with the Israeli occupation authorities inany form that may be construed by these authorities as amountingto implicit recognition or acceptance of the status quo, imposed bytheir declaring that al-Quds to be the unified and eternal capital ofthe Zionist entity, and in particular inviting all countries to refrainfrom:a) signing any agreement in al-Quds al-Sharif;b) paying any official visits to al-Quds;c) conducting any formal talks in al-Quds.6

This OIC declaration, in January 1981, called to support the al-QudsCommittee and to ratchet up the struggle for the liberation of the Palestini-ans from Zionist colonialism and occupation. Was that not precisely whatEurope was saying to Israel, a colonialist, occupying people, thereby refut-ing its own roots? Was it not providing political, legal, international, andfinancial support to the Palestinian terrorist jihad against Israel?

This political link between the OIC and the European Union did notonly appear in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict but also in internalEuropean politics concerning the massive Muslim immigration into Europe,which started in the years 1974-75. It was then that a joint European-Arabcell, the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation (PAEAC),was established with the task of passing on the political demands from theArab League countries to the European community and to monitor theirimplementation within Europe. At the Euro-Arab dialogue session held inTunis February 10-12, 1977, the Arab delegation had proposed a joint Euro-Arab cell for political consultations.7 In a leaflet prepared in 1994, at the

6. The Conference of the Islamic Summit in Mecca (January 1981), cf. BatYe’or, Eurabia, 288.

7. Documents D’Actualite Internationale, Ministere des Affaires Etrangeres,Paris, nos. 16-17 (1977):319-324, §11.


time of PAEAC’s breakup in the official political body of the BarcelonaDeclaration, PAEAC prided itself on having obtained the Venice Declara-tion of 1980. Opening the way toward Eurabia, PAEAC’s networks pro-claimed in Europe the grandeur of Muslim civilization, promoted the spreadof Arab culture, advocated for changes in teaching in schools and universi-ties, and called for special deference and respect toward immigrants andtheir culture, blasphemy laws, sex segregation, censorship, and harsh anti-Zionist policy. These networks imposed multiculturalism and its politicallycorrect lethal framework. Such framework developed rapidly into a multi-communitarianism, recalling the regimes installed in the conquered territo-ries of the Arab and Turkish caliphates founded on jihad and dhimmitude.

The terms of settlement of an immigration that was to profoundlytransform Europe and the Nine’s policy toward Israel were jointly discussedin the summaries of the biannual, unofficial meetings of PAEAC (the Euro-Arab dialogue), co-chaired by an Arab and a European, and sponsored bythe General Secretary of the Arab League and the European Commission.This cooperation between Europe and the OIC resulted from innumerablenetworks bringing these two bodies together at every level over decades.That is how the OIC succeeded—without too much effort, it is true—toPalestinize the European political, cultural, and media sectors and to Islam-ize its demography, culture, universities, and policies. As is clearly evidentfrom the sessions’ documents, both cultural dynamics were interrelated.

Although Eurabian networks pretend that this whole issue is anotherconspirational theory, references to this policy exist in numerous sources,not least in the French minister for foreign affairs, in OIC texts, and in U.S.academia.

What does Palestinization mean? First, it means creating a people as asubstitute for Israel, which takes over its history and therefore its legiti-macy. From whence comes the delegitimization of Israel, an intruder statein the region and in history? The Palestinization of history denies Israel’sidentity and its cultural and historic rights within its homeland, includingJudea, Samaria, and Jerusalem.8 For the OIC, this process is part and parcelof Islamic theology, which regards the Bible as simply a falsified version ofthe Koran. According to Islam, biblical history is Islamic history, and thebiblical characters we see represented in churches are all Muslim prophetswho have virtually no connection with the facts reported in the Bible.

This context explains the Islamization of the Jewish and Christianreligious heritage, an approach that involves denying the identity of these

8. See this attempted subversion of history jointly undertaken by Europe andthe OIC in Bat Ye’or, Europe: Globalization and the Coming of the UniversalCaliphate (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011).


two religions, since Christianity views itself as emerging from Judaism,whose scriptures it adopted. If the Bible is an Islamic account, Christianityand not just Judaism are both falsifications of Islam. The negation of bibli-cal history, with which Europe has assiduously linked itself by claimingthat Israel is a colonizing intruder in its own homeland—that is to say,challenging the historic rights of the Jews to their own homeland—alsonegates Christian history and confirms the Koranic interpretation refutingthe historicity of both Torah and Gospels.

Hence, if there was never a history of Israel or of the Gospels, but onlythe history of Ibrahim, Ishmael, Issa—the Koranic Jesus—if all the biblicalkings and prophets were Muslim, in what religious belief is the Westrooted? Would it not be in the Koran? That is the logical conclusion ofEurope’s choice, when, furious at the return of the Jews to Jerusalem in1967, it deliberately decided to chase them out and attribute their heritage tothose who, by a war invasion, had illegitimately occupied it since 1948,expelling and dispossessing all its Jewish inhabitants. In a nutshell, if theIsraelis are foreign colonialists, occupiers of their own country, it meansthey have no past, no history; and if Judaism is just a tissue of lies, the sameapplies to Christianity. If Israel never existed in the past, then its modernrestoration is just a colonial deception on territory to which it has no histori-cal, religious, or cultural claims, and so its destruction is justified. But ifhistory testifies to the contrary, then Europe becomes willingly responsiblefor the abominable crime of genocide—wiping out the past existence of apeople in order to remove its current legitimacy and its human, religious,cultural, and historical rights—not to mention the participation, organiza-tion, and financing by European nations and the European Commission ofan international campaign of incitement to hatred for the dismembering ofIsrael.

The Palestinization of Europe is not just its theological Islamizationthrough Palestinianism, the ideology for Israel’s demise by disclaiming apeople’s territorial sovereignty, history, and culture, in conformity with thejihadist worldview. Palestinianism is also a paranoid obsession to houndIsrael while claiming such hounding is for its own good. By proclaimingthat the Palestinian cause is the cause of peace and justice, Europe expendsgreat effort, energy, and violence in sending Israel back behind the 1948lines it knows are indefensible. Hundreds of thousands of books, accusa-tions, and speeches subvert the facts and impose this policy.

Since its 1981 symposium, the OIC’s requests have not changed:Expulsion of Israel from all the territories that were annexed and occupiedby Jordan until 1967, including Jerusalem; refusal to renounce or abandon asingle inch of these territories; recognition of total Palestinian national sov-ereignty; the rejection of any situation that would harm Arab sovereignty


over al-Quds al-Sharif; endorsement of the Arab Palestinian people’s ina-lienable rights, including the rights of return, self-determination, and theestablishment of an independent Palestinian state. The Mecca summit(1981) recommended:

• Stressing the commitment to liberate all the Palestinian and Arabterritories occupied since the 1967 aggression, including Holy Al-Quds al-Sharif; no renouncing or relinquishment of any part ofthese territories or impairment of the full national sovereignty overthese territories [sic].

• Rejecting any situation that would prejudice [sic] Arab sovereigntyover al-Quds al-Sharif.

• Pledging to recover the national inalienable rights of the PalestinianArab people, including their right to return to self-determinationand to the establishment of an independent Palestinian state on theirnational soil, led by the Palestine Liberation Organization, the solelegitimate representative of the Palestinian people [sic].9

There followed the detailed announcement of the action plan to boy-cott Israel, the setting of an international defamation campaign, and the con-tinuation of the OIC offensive by any and all means. This same anti-Israelstrategy has been repeated and maintained in all its details in the documentsof the OIC and reaffirmed at its 2008 New York meeting and thereafter.

HUMAN RIGHTS FOR EVERYONE—EXCEPT ISRAELIS

Europe is not saying anything else, having chosen al-Quds over Jerusa-lem. On December 6, 2010, a large group of former heads of state andcommissioners of the European Union—that is, those who obeyed theOIC’s orders and perhaps even encouraged, promoted, and strengthenedthem—sent a letter to the current leaders of the European Union remindingthem of the decisions that they had taken concerning Israel and requestingthem to oblige Israel to comply with them.10

It is no surprise to note that the European Union is poaching on theOIC’s preserve—adopting its policies, locking up and ghettoizing Israelwithin its indefensible 1948 armistice lines, and proceeding with theIslamization of Judea, Samaria, and Jerusalem. These leaders, while theyacknowledged the enormous sums paid to the Palestinian Authority to build

9. Extracts of this conference are in Bat Ye’or, Eurabia, 285.10. Andrew Rettman, “Former EU Leaders Challenge Ashton on Israel,” http://

euobserver.com/9/31477, December 10, 2010. Cf. also http://www.dhimmitude.org/eurabia/EU-Anti-Zionist-Campaign-Unveiled.pdf. A comparison of this letterwith sections 20-27 of the 1981 Mecca Islamic Conference proves their similarity.


another state within this area, demanded that the European Union requireIsrael to cede to the second Palestinian state—the first one being Jordan,with 78% of the League of Nations’ Palestine—100% of the territories thathad been liberated from illegal Jordanian occupation in 1967, with Jerusa-lem—that is, al-Quds—as its capital. The signatories recalled that fordecades (in fact since 1973), the European Union had supported andfinanced the new state’s institutions and infrastructure, which it was busybuilding on Israel’s flank. In order to force Israel to follow their dictates,the signatories forcefully demanded a boycott campaign, sanctions, andreprisals against the Jewish state, because, as they claimed without furtherexplanation, Europe has a vital interest in the creation of a Palestinian state.What is involved, claim the signatories, is the European Union’s credibilityand good diplomatic and commercial relations with the Arab world. Thisimplies that the European Union is constrained to help in the demise ofIsrael in not failing its commitments to the Arab world, thereby preservingits good relations with it.

The BDS campaign against Israel—required by the signatories of thisletter—is based upon two pillars: the OIC, and the one carrying out itsnefarious deeds: the European Union, which under the cover of humanrights has launched an international campaign of incitement to hatredagainst Israel, based upon deceitful allegations it had concocted itself, whiledenying human rights to Israelis. The names of the signatories to this letterwill enter history as the founders of the Palestinization of Europe. Amongthem we can mention European Union functionaries Romano Prodi, JavierSolana, Chris Patten, and Benita Ferrero-Waldner; among heads of stateand former ministers, Richard von Weizsacker (former German federalpresident, 1984-94), Helmut Schmidt, and the former British minister in theBlair government, Clare Short. The French are the most numerous on thelist: Hubert Vedrine, Herve de Charrette, Roland Dumas, Lionel Jospin,Jean-Francois Poncet.

PALESTINIAN–NAZISM CONNECTION: DE-JUDAIZING CHRISTIANITY

In a large number of documents going back to the 1970s, the OICrecommends cooperation with churches in the fight against Israel. Thisemerged in particular from a conference held in Amman in 2004 as part ofthe Muslim-Christian dialogue. The official theme was the protectionagainst Israel of Muslim and Christian holy places in Palestine. The purposeof the Amman conference was to establish a global strategy for the re-Islamization of Jerusalem, because, as one of the lecturers explained, Jeru-salem is central in the spiritual edifice of the Jewish Zionist entity, and its


expulsion would make this entire spiritual edifice and the Zionist entitycome tumbling down like a pack of cards.

At th Amman conference, the speakers emphasized the major impor-tance of Muslim-Christian solidarity in the fight to seize al-Quds and todrive Israel out of it. Their proposals envisaged a whole range of schemes,including the adoption of the Muslim and Christian holy sites in al-Quds byevery mosque, church, and monastery, and by Muslim and Christian institu-tions worldwide. They recommended a large-scale, joint Muslim and Chris-tian media global campaign in the United Nations, the United States, andinternational NGOs to expose Israel’s falsehoods. Promoting al-Quds wouldbe done through films, television, songs, and festivals, under the supervi-sion of a special Muslim and Christian cell that would be working with allthe appropriate means.

Within this context is the Kairos Palestine declaration of 2010, whichbrands Israel, using the terms occupation of Arab lands, colonization, andapartheid; while conversely, Palestinians are innocent victims resisting theoccupation and aspiring only to security, justice, and peace. The Kairosdeclaration, hardly surprisingly, condemns all Christian theology that isbased upon the Bible or on biblical faith or history that would legitimizeIsrael. Understand if you can . . . What would remain of Christian theology,faith, or history if you get rid of Israel and the Bible? Would ChristianPalestinianism be the camouflage of Nazism, which had planned to de-Judaize Christianity? The document ends with a call to people, businesses,and countries to take part in the boycott, disinvestment, and sanctions cam-paign against Israel. This request is in line with the demands of the OIC andsimilar to the letter of the European former leaders, who are the onesresponsible for the current Eurabian situation.

What are the consequences of the choice of al-Quds by Europe for itsidentity, the criteria for assessing its own history, and its immigration pol-icy? The Europe that chose al-Quds and rejected Jerusalem is rejecting itsown basic identity. It is denying the Bible, which is not merely a religioustext that states various values, but also a chronicle of the coming of Jesusand Christianity, which for Christians is its culmination. If there had notbeen a Jewish people, nor biblical history or geography, there would not beChristianity either. Accordingly, Judaism and Christianity are just a hugeaberration, and what remains are the Koran and the Muslim Jesus, whoseeschatological mission is the destruction of Christianity.

The choice of al-Quds replaces the Bible with the Koran. Europeknows that the OIC has decided to move its head office from Jeddah to al-Quds. The OIC is deemed the most suitable institution to represent theworld caliphate, its mission being to work to root the universal Ummah in


the Koran and Sunna. What church could remain in al-Quds? By seeking todestroy Israel, the Church is destroying its own very existence.

With such a disavowal of its own roots and identity, should we still besurprised that Europe has sold off its peoples cheaply on their own terri-tory? In the same way that the European Union has not ceased to harassIsrael and to challenge its roots and rights, it has dragged to court thosecourageous Europeans who have asserted their own identity, rights, andfreedoms. Transposing its anti-Israeli policy to Europe, the European Unionwants to create a tabula rasa of historical nationalisms and of the privilegesof sovereign states to transfer to the United Nations—dominated by theOIC—the world governance of human rights. The essential rights ofEuropeans to security, their history, and freedom of expression are dis-proved, rebutted, and dismissed by the OIC under the guise of Islamophobiaand its vehement request for European multiculturalism. Rooted in the civi-lization of jihad and dhimmitude, Islamophobia imposes its own criteriathrough its European and UN go-betweens in its new Western empire. Sowhile Europe prides itself on creating universal, humanitarian govern-ance,11,12 on the international scene, the OIC is implementing a Koranicorder of Islamic human rights.

The OIC’s domination of the United Nations was recently illustratedby the Goldstone Report. On its Web site, the OIC states its support for thisreport, which contains accusations of war crimes allegedly committed byIsrael in the Gaza Strip in January 2009. Goldstone, according to the Website, was adopted by the Human Rights Council in Geneva with the supportof the Islamic group, which continues to defend it on the sidelines of theUN General Assembly so that it will be referred to the Security Council.The OIC has reaffirmed its wish to see its content adopted by the interna-tional community as an international document.

With the repudiation of Israel, the European Union is repudiatingitself. It is putting the emphasis on the Greco-Roman heritage and eliminat-ing that of Christianity to please the OIC and Muslim migrants. When itsbodies named it, they eliminated its biblical and therefore Jewish basis, as ifChristianity had arisen in the world out of nowhere. This identity repressionis just one more concession to Islam and its culture that is hostile to Jewsand Christians, an issue that has been neither recognized nor repudiated. Tothrow Judaism (Israel) and Christianity (the West) into the dustbin of his-

11. Mathieu Bock-Cote, “L’empire europeen universel contre le Souverainismeamericain,” in Controverses: L’Europe, amie d’Israel? no. 16 (Paris: Editions del’Eclat, March 2011), 91.

12. http://www.oic-oci.org/topic_detail.asp?t_id=5154&x_key=.


tory is to remove human, historical, religious, cultural, and national rightsfrom Jews and Christians.

The destruction of Israel will let Europe free itself from its own iden-tity, one of the central objectives of Nazism. It flaunts itself as global, mul-ticultural, and Islamic—deterritorialized in the vision of Sweden’s formerPM Carl Bildt—acculturated and without a past, reduced to being just anungrateful beneficiary of Islamic cultural superiority and an empty space inwhich to welcome the immigrants and to subsidize their requirements whilefinancing their economic development in their own countries. As in daysgone by, when Byzantine princes paid tribute to the Turks to stop theminvading their lands, today Europe has to pay a ransom to Muslim Mediter-ranean countries to protect itself from their invasion. The world governancethe European Union seeks to obtain through the elimination of Europeannational sovereignties and cultures leads it to favor Muslim immigration, afactor for interbreeding, rapprochement, and merger of Europe into the OICfold. Today, parties on the left are promoting the policy of the OIC and ofthe Alliance of Civilizations: open up Europe to let young people fromAfrica and Asia have two- to five-year stays in the European Union andfinance their businesses when they go back home. Will Europeans be ableto support their fragile economy together with those of Africa and Asia?Are they unaware that they have become the dhimmis of the OIC, governedby their ministers in its service?

Eurabia and Palestinianism come from the same rejection and the samepolicy applied to the destruction of the nation-state and the manifestation ofthe spirit and culture of peoples condemned to extinction in the globalized,humanitarian utopia. Their points in common are the war against Israel; thede-Judaization of Christianity; the de-Christianization of Europe; and thejoint European Union-OIC policy to strengthen UN’s global governancethat the OIC aims to monopolize. This suicidal approach is specific toEurope; it does not exist in China or in India—even less in Muslimcountries.

Systematically pursued over decades by Europe’s chancelleries, thispolicy requires an infrastructure, bodies, and screening of recruitment in thepolitical, media, and cultural sectors, which have consistently purged anydisturbing element. The Palestinization of politics since 1973 led to statecontrol over culture and the media and the development of a single, authori-tarian thinking, dictated for the entire European Union by a conclave ofcommissioners making arbitrary decisions.


EUROPE GOES TO WAR

Europe, it is true, has renounced internal wars, but only to become themercenaries of the OIC. With its armies, networks, and financing in thebillions, it supports the Muslim advance into Europe, the Middle East, andAfrica, in the name of a version of human rights that is challenged byshari’a and politically tainted, since it refuses equal rights for non-Muslims.Provided with a mandate by the United Nations, which is to say by the OIC,Europe in the name of “the right to protection” can finally go to war todefend its allies’ interests. That is why it is helping the Muslim Brotherhoodrise in Egypt, supporting Islamist elements in Libya, and trying to replaceIsrael with the caliphate, after having destabilized Europe.

With the anarchic uprisings of the Arab Spring (March 2011), mostEuropean countries and the United States, led by France and its foreignminister, Alain Juppe, have become involved in Arab and African tribalconflicts, invoking the “right of interference” and the “right of protection.”These rights, however, as we have said, are applied selectively, becausethey are never invoked to protect Christians against persecution in Egypt,Iraq, Turkey, Algeria, Sudan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Indonesia, or Pakistan;they are also not used to protect sailors arbitrarily taken hostage by theSomalis. Europe would find it grotesque and indecent to invoke these rightsagainst the spread of anti-Israeli hatred, calls for genocide against the Jews,against the deluge of rockets launched from Gaza into Israel, or against thehideous crimes perpetrated by its Palestinian allies against Israeli civilians.Nor has it reacted to the Islamization of the biblical holy places in Hebron,both Jewish and Christian, by UNESCO, acting on orders of the OIC. Yetthis approach is a serious breach of the religious and historical rights ofJews and Christians, and contradicts human rights.

It is evident that those Europeans wishing to restore the essential val-ues that caused the flowering of their civilization can only proceed throughthe destruction of occult mechanisms grafted, without their knowledge, bythose promoting Eurabia onto the recovery of the Nazi heritage and pursuedin the postwar period by its servants within the political and diplomaticsystems, as has been recently investigated by German historians and jour-nalists. What in the 1970s seemed to be just a little ritual dance about thehopes for the disappearance of Israel and the French infatuation with Arafat,carried out by a corps de ballet of European politicians and diplomats, hasproven today to be a hell for Europe. These days of Passover’s commemo-ration remind us that Israel, in its march from slavery to freedom, gave tohumanity the principles of equality, unalienable human dignity, and man’sindividual responsibility. Against this message of freedom and man’s basicand imprescriptible rights, the supporters of totalitarianism and of the dehu-


manizing system of dhimmitude strain unremittingly to replace the right tolife by the granting of tolerance to exist in infamous dhimmitude.

*Bat Ye’or is an Egyptian-born British writer on Jews and Christians living underIslamic governments. Her several books include Islam and Dhimmitude, Eurabia,and her most recent work, Europe Globalization and the Coming of the UniversalCaliphate (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 2011). She is mar-ried to David Littman.

Conspiracy, N’est-ce Pas?

Hadassa Ben-Itto*

We democratic countries see the masses gathered in the public squareand are very sympathetic to the outcry against dictatorships and to the fightfor freedom. But I am concerned with the masses in the streets and with theoutcome of a brainwashing process that has been going on for such a longtime. Lies have been spread around the world as a strategic weapon. Publicopinion and public discourse have been polluted, and now the masses arestanding up and trying to tell the leaders what to do.

If you paid careful attention to what happened in Cairo’s TahrirSquare, for instance, you saw the placards of Mubarak with a Star of Davidon his face. Lara Logan, an American journalist, was sexually molested inthe middle of the square and was called a Jew, although she is not Jewish.She does not have to be Jewish; the word “Jew” has become an acceptedinsult in the public square. A well-known preacher stood up and talked notabout freedom but about the Jews, about what is going to happen to uswhen the masses take over. So we are rightfully worried.

THE PROTOCOLS: A LONG AND LASTING IMPRINT

These deeply disturbing phenomena of attacks on Jews have beenfueled by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a virulent antisemitic screedproduced in France in the late nineteenth century. The Protocols, whichproclaims that there is a Jewish plan for achieving global domination, hasbeen proven to be both a forgery and a lie.

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World democratic societies have sinned for years by ignoring this phe-nomenon. After being a judge for many years, I retired to study The Proto-cols. After six years of research I wrote a book about my findings that hasnow appeared in ten languages, most recently in Arabic. The Protocols wasnever translated into Hebrew because we ignored it, thinking it was a badjoke.

One of the stories in my book is about a retired agent named HenriRollin of the French Secret Service, who wrote books about European polit-ics during the 1920s and the 1930s. Rollin was well educated about Russiaand, having been a secret agent, had a lot of information that was not avail-able to others. He had realized the importance of The Protocols of theElders of Zion—maintaining that it influenced everything that was happen-ing in Europe, most important the infiltration of the Nazis into Europeanpolitics. Rollin wrote an 800-page book entitled L’apocalypse de NotreTemps, all about how The Protocols had left its imprint on Europeanpolitics.

L’apocalypse was published in France on September 3, 1939, and youwould think at the beginning of World War II the book would have beencompletely ignored. The Nazis, however, did not ignore the book. Whenthey conquered France they banned it, and so it vanished. Only in 1991 wasRollin’s book republished by a small publisher in France. I see myself ascontinuing in Rollin’s footsteps by following the history of The Protocolsthrough the last decade and into the twenty-first century, and its impact onworld politics.

Why is The Protocols, a completely fraudulent document, importanttoday? Because it is being published around the world, with new editions inArabic almost every year, and in Persian and Turkish as well. These publi-cations are financed by government money and distributed not only inArabic-speaking countries, but also to Muslim minorities around the world.

New editions are necessary because the introductions are updatedevery year. The introductions say if you do not believe that the Jews arereally planning to take over the world, look at what is happening in yourcountry and region. Everything that is happening is rooted in The Protocols,an implementation of the “Jewish Conspiracy.” If there is a financial crisis,an AIDS or a flu epidemic, a terrorist attack, an upheaval or a catastrophe,one can always point to a chapter or page in The Protocols because it issuch a devious document that everything is there. There is a whole detailedplan of how to take over the world.

2011] CONSPIRACY, N’EST-CE PAS? 599

THE PROTOCOLS AS RATIONALE

During the preparation for the Russian Revolution, Russian Bolshevikcells could not operate openly in Russia, so they were active elsewhere inEurope, including France. A special envoy of the Russian secret police wassent to France to uncover the Bolshevik cells. The Russian Secret Serviceand the Black Hundreds, an ultra-nationalist movement in Russia whoseslogan was “Beat the Jews and Save Russia,” were trying to convince theczar that the Jews were behind the Bolshevik Revolution. The czar wasalready convinced, but they needed proof.

More than 100 years ago, a French woman by the name of JulietteAdam had a salon. In those days, women still did not have the right to voteor be elected, but important and educated women who wanted to make adifference established salons. Adam was a very educated woman—a histo-rian, newspaper owner, and author—and she had a political salon wheremany antisemites gathered. There is much evidence that the preparations forthe Dreyfus trial, in which a French Jewish army officer was wrongly con-victed of treason and later exonerated, took place in her salon.

Juliette Adam’s husband was the chief of police in Paris, who collabo-rated with the Russian envoy sent by the Secret Police, Piotr Rachkowsky,because the French did not like Bolshevik terrorists preparing bombs insmall Paris hotels. Rachowsky, who was looking for ways to implicateJews, was invited to Adam’s salon, where someone told him of a book,banned in France but that the salon possessed, that could be turned intosomething against the Jews.

THE PROTOCOLS: ANTISEMITIC PROPAGANDA

The Protocols is a reworking of a book written by a French lawyer,Maurice Joly, in the 1860s. In Joly’s biography, he tells how he decided towrite a book to describe to the French people the danger they were in fromthe fearsome dictatorial regime of Napoleon III. He decided to write anallegory in the form of a dialogue between two people in the afterworld:Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Machiavelli would represent the ideas andpractices of Napoleon III and his terrible regime, while Montesquieu wouldrepresent Joly’s liberal ideas. Joly published it in Brussels because theFrench would not publish it. He was arrested, tried, and went to prison. Hisbook was banned.

In Joly’s book, Machiavelli explains to Montesquieu why the peopleare dumb and why a dictator is necessary and what tools he can use to takeover, to dominate his country and the world. There are chapters in this bookdedicated to each subject—how to take over the police force, how to take


over the legal system, how to do away with all the lawyers, how to raisehavoc in the labor field, and how to plant bombs in strategic locations. It isa manual on how to dominate the world. The voice of Montesquieubecomes weaker while the voice of Machiavelli becomes stronger, and atthe end Montesquieu says, “Oh God, what have you allowed?” Throughallegory, Joly was telling the French people that this was what was happen-ing in France.

Some 60 to 65 percent of The Protocols are verbatim passages fromthis book. Chapters were added to make it the Jewish plan to dominate theworld. The Protocols was first published in Russia in 1905 by a religiousfanatic in a monastery. From there it went around the world. After therevolution, officers of the White Army, who fled Russia, carried The Proto-cols with them to convince the world that what happened to the Romanovdynasty in Russia would happen to them. The Jewish plan was to topple allthe monarchs and governments in Europe. Between 1919 and 1921, TheProtocols was published in every language in the world. Six editions, blam-ing the Jews for World War I, were published in Germany in one year.

The Protocols is not just a libel; it is a political document describing aJewish criminal conspiracy to dominate the world. Almost the first leaderoutside Russia who picked it up was Adolf Hitler. As a strategic step, theNazis decided to use The Protocols as a central part of their ideology, as weknow from correspondence between Hitler and Goebbels. A German histo-rian describes in his book how Hitler used The Protocols on the way to theFinal Solution, but Hitler had already mentioned it in Mein Kampf. TheNazis were masters of the “Big Lie,” and their tactics have been adopted bythe Muslim world. The theory is that the bigger the lie, the better success ofbrainwashing the public.

THE BERN TRIAL OF 1934

There was a major trial in Bern, Switzerland, in 1934 after a new Naziorganization started using The Protocols, distributing copies at a publicrally. The local Jews, who realized what was happening across the border inGermany, decided to take the Swiss Nazis to trial. In the introduction to theEnglish edition of my book on The Protocols, Lord Chief Justice ofEngland Harry Wolfe wrote that the Bern trial is probably the most impor-tant trial ever because in this trial, live witnesses testified in court, describ-ing the origins of The Protocols and the use made of this document. Theyincluded the head of the opposition to the czar, historians, politicians, andformer agents who escaped the revolution and decided to bear witness tothis forgery.

2011] CONSPIRACY, N’EST-CE PAS? 601

The Germans established what they called Weltdienst, a center locatedin Erfurt, headed by Ulrich Fleischhauer, that spread Nazi ideology andpropaganda around the world. Nazi branches or organizations with differentnames started springing up in every country, fed on Nazi ideology and tac-tics. At the 1934 Bern trial, the Swiss judge ordered both sides to appointexperts. The Swiss Nazi defendants could not find an expert to testify thatThe Protocols were an authentic document, so Ulrich Fleischhauer came toSwitzerland to be the expert. When the judge asked him if he was an experton The Protocols, he said that he was not, but that he was an expert on theJews.

Every trial against The Protocols before the Bern trial ended with asettlement, because the defendants could never prove the authenticity ofThe Protocols, but when the Nazis came into power they prohibited anysettlement in a trial concerning The Protocols, deciding to use courtroomsas a forum to spread Nazi ideology.

THE PROTOCOLS IN THE UNITED STATES

The Protocols was also published in the United States, where its big-gest promoter was Henry Ford, who published 97 excerpts in his newspa-per, the Dearborn Independent; these scurrilous antisemitic articles werethen collected in a book called The International Jew. Ford was sued incourt by American Jews, and the trial went on for six years (1921-1927). Inthe end, Ford settled with the Jewish community.

In 1964, the United States Senate appointed a committee to study TheProtocols. In a unanimous report nine senior senators called The Protocolsthe hoax of the century and a document endangering America.

THE PROTOCOLS IN THE MUSLIM WORLD

The Protocols, first used by the Russian czars and then by the commu-nists, later served as a central theme in Nazi propaganda. It now has beenhanded over to the Muslim world.

The Protocols is a central issue in Arab and Muslim propaganda, evenin what we call moderate countries, including countries that made peacewith Israel. It is everywhere, in every Arabic book fair—more in Egypt,less in Jordan. It is in public discourse, in newspapers, and even in TV soapoperas. It describes world history from beginning to end, including theFrench Revolution, as part of the Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world.Until the end of World War II, the problem was the Jews, but after theestablishment of the State of Israel, the target has become Israel.


The Protocols is a best-seller in all Muslim countries because this iswhat they have been told over and over again in their media and school-books. When my book was translated into Arabic, the translator and pub-lisher, both graduates of the Hebrew University, one a Christian Arab andthe other a Muslim Arab, told me that until they read my book, they did notknow that The Protocols is a forgery.

THE DANGER PERSISTS

There is no Jewish conspiracy to dominate the world, but there is ananti-Jewish conspiracy. Using The Protocols against the Jews for 100 yearsis part of a conspiracy, and everybody who takes part in it is a conspiratoragainst us. It starts with the Jews, but it does not end with the Jews.

The first airplane that was hijacked was an Israeli airplane, and nowwe line up in every airport for security checks, so the world should be con-cerned. The danger of contaminating the public discourse with lies is a dan-ger to the whole world.

*Hadassa Ben-Itto, author of The Lie That Wouldn’t Die: The Protocols of theElders of Zion (2005), served for 31 years as a judge in all levels of the Israelicourts, including as an acting justice of the Supreme Court. She has also served asan official representative of the State of Israel in various international forums,including UNESCO and the United Nations General Assembly, and is currently thehonorary president of the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists.This essay, which has been modified for publication in this issue of the Journal forthe Study of Antisemitism, first appeared in Jerusalem Issue Brief, Vol. 10, No. 38,and is based on Judge Ben-Itto’s oral presentation at the Institute for ContemporaryAffairs of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs on February 24, 2011.

What Happened to Pakistan’s Jews?

Shalva Weil*

Pakistan was never traditionally antisemitic. In fact, it may come as asurprise that Pakistan hosted small, yet thriving, Jewish communities fromthe 19th century until the end of the 1960s. Recently, Yoel Reuben, a Pakis-tani Jew living in the Israeli town of Lod whose family originated inLahore, documented some of the history of the Jewish communities withphotographs of original documents. When India and Pakistan were onecountry, before the partition in 1947, the Jews were treated with toleranceand equality. In the first half of the 20th century, there were nearly 1,000Jewish residents in Pakistan living in different cities: Karachi, Peshawar,Quetta, and Lahore. The largest Jewish community lived in Karachi, wherethere was a large synagogue and a smaller prayer hall. There were twosynagogues in Peshawar, one small prayer hall in Lahore belonging to theAfghan Jewish community, and one prayer hall in Quetta. Even today,according to unofficial sources, there are rumors that some Jews remain inPakistan, including doctors and members of the free professions, who con-verted or passed themselves off as members of other religions.

The Jews of Pakistan were of various origins, but most were from theBene Israel community of India, and came to Pakistan in the employ of theBritish. Yifah, a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, relates thather great-great-grandfather Samuel Reuben Bhonkar, who was a BeneIsrael, came to Karachi in British India to work as a jailer, and died there in1928. The Bene Israel originated in the Konkan villages, but many movedto Bombay from the end of the 18th century on. In Pakistan, they spokeMarathi, their mother tongue from Maharashtra; Urdu, the local language;and most spoke English. Prayers were conducted in Hebrew.

In 1893, a Bene Israel from Bombay, Solomon David Umerdekar,inaugurated the Karachi Magen Shalom Synagogue on the corner of Jamila

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Street and Nishtar Road, which officially opened in 1912. During theseyears, the Jewish community thrived. In 1903, the community set up theYoung Man’s Jewish Association, and the Karachi Bene Israel Relief Fundwas established to support poor Jews. In 1918, the Karachi Jewish Syndi-cate was formed to provide housing at reasonable rents, and the All IndiaIsraelite League, which represented 650 Bene Israel living in the provinceof Sind (including Hyderabad, Larkuna, Mirpur-Khas, and Sukkur, as wellas Karachi), was first convened—founded by two prominent Bene Israel,Jacob Bapuji Israel and David S. Erulkar. Karachi became a fulcrum for theBene Israel in India, the place where they congregated for High Holidayprayers. There was also a prayer hall, which served the Afghan Jews resid-ing in the city. A 1941 government census recorded 1,199 Pakistani Jews:513 men and 538 women. So accepted were the Jews of Karachi in theseyears that Abraham Reuben, a leader in the Jewish community, became thefirst Jewish councilor on the Karachi Municipal Corporation.

ANTI-ZIONISM BEGINS

On August 15, 1947, India was partitioned and the Dominion of Paki-stan was declared. Partition effectively signaled the end of the BritishEmpire. Fearful of their future in the new Islamic state, Jews began to flee.Some fled from Afghanistan; the Bene Israel community in Lahore fled toKarachi and from there moved to Bombay. Muslim refugees from India,called Mohajir, streamed into Pakistan and attacked Jewish sites. The situa-tion was exacerbated by the declaration of independence for the state ofIsrael in May 1948. Many of the Karachi Jews left the city in 1948, afterrioters attacked the Karachi synagogue during a demonstration in May ofthat year against President Truman’s recognition of Israel. Some membersof the community emigrated to Israel via India, while others settled inCanada and the United Kingdom.

Pogroms against the Jews recurred during the Suez War in 1956 andthe Six-Day War in 1967. Most of the remaining Jews emigrated and, in1968, the Pakistani Jewish community numbered only 350 in Karachi, withone synagogue, a welfare organization, and a recreational organization.After 1968, there is no record of any Pakistani Jews outside Karachi.

Today, anti-Israel discourse manifests itself in the notion that Israeland Pakistan are ultimately in competition and thus only one can flourish.In April 2008, Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul, the former chief of Pakistan’s powerfulInter-Services Intelligence, proclaimed that “two states came into existencein 1947 and 1948: one, Pakistan; two, Israel. The two are threats to eachother. Ultimately, only one of them will survive.” Pakistan aligns itself with

2011] WHAT HAPPENED TO PAKISTAN’S JEWS? 605

the Palestinian Muslim cause and rejects the United States insofar as it isallied with Israel.

THE KARACHI JEWISH COMMUNITY ENDS

The Magen Shalom synagogue in Karachi was destroyed on July 17,1988, by order of Pakistan president Zia-Ul-Hak to make way for a shop-ping mall in the Ranchore Lines neighborhood of Karachi. In 1989, theoriginal ark and podium were stored in Karachi; a Torah scroll case wastaken by an American to the United States.

As late as 2006, the sole survivor of the Karachi Jewish community,Rachel Joseph, a former teacher, then 88 years old, was battling for com-pensation for the broken promise from the property developers that haddemolished the old synagogue; in exchange, she would receive an apart-ment, and a new small synagogue would be constructed on the old site.While the litigation wore on, she languished in a tiny room.

This year, a Muslim Pakistani-American filmmaker, Shoeb Yunus,shot a film about the Jewish cemetery in Karachi. Today, it is part of thelarger Cutchi Memon graveyard, which has a Muslim caretaker. It tookYunus eight months to gain admission, and the camera crew was allowedonly 10 minutes to shoot. He estimates that there are 200-400 Jewishgraves. The neglected cemetery has not been destroyed since its last custo-dian, Rachel Joseph, died on July 17, 2006.

*Shalva Weil is a senior researcher at the Research Institute for Innovation in Edu-cation at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. A specialist in Indian Jewry,Weil is the founding chairperson of the Israel-India Friendship Association.

Remembrance of Warwick Days

Smadar Bakovic*

It was in the spring of 2010 that the University of Warwick’s StudentUnion called for a referendum to twin with the Hamas-backed Islamic Uni-versity of Gaza (IUG).1 To me, it seemed irrational that a Western univer-sity, which prides itself on inclusivity and on being a free marketplace ofideas, would willingly associate itself with an institution in which Holo-caust denial is taught in history classes2 and where a significant segment ofWarwick University’s own student body—gays, women, Jews, andothers—would be excluded. It was then that the vehemence of some stu-dents toward Israel, the Zionist project, realizing the national aspirations ofthe Jewish people, erupted in full force, exposing the ugly, dangerous faceof British academia.

An anti-Zionist event was held, moderated by a British professor, inwhich Israel’s right to exist was challenged. Israel was portrayed as a mur-derous apartheid regime committing a Holocaust against the Palestinians,and Jews were demonized. In a Western university, in the nation where theBalfour Declaration originated, the Jews’ right to self-determination wasquestioned. The organizers, moderator, and supporters were not extremerightists, and neither were they predominantly Muslims; they were almostexclusively European. Without exception, all would define themselves asleftist liberals defending human rights and freedom around the world.

Their hostility, however, was deceitfully directed only toward Israeland its “racist, apartheid-like policies.” It was not to be directed at Jews—after all, the speaker was a Jew and a Jew can’t be antisemitic, they said.Unable to focus their hatred at Jews (probably fearing accusations of racism

1. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2096876,00.html; http://www.terrorism-info.org.il /malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/hamas_e093.htm.

2. http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=450.

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and antisemitism), they directed their obsessive anger toward Israel, all thewhile being moderated by a Warwick faculty member.

Israel was portrayed as an illegitimate entity, comparable to apartheidSouth Africa, and as such must be eradicated. It was not surprising, then,that I was to be called a Nazi by a European student, who shamelesslyposted such comments on the Internet. After all, if the existence of the Jew-ish state can be challenged, dooming Jews to endless antisemitism thatresults for some in extermination, then any distorted criticism then becomeslegitimate.

Anti-Zionist and antisemitic sentiments became personal when theDepartment of Politics and International Studies (PAIS) forced me to workunder and ultimately be graded by Professor Nicola Pratt—the same profes-sor who moderated the event described above. Professor Pratt is an activistin the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which calls to “oppose the Apartheidand Zionist nature of the Israeli state.”3 She supports the Boycott, Divest-ment, Sanctions (BDS) movement by signing petitions that call for boycott-ing all Israeli institutions4 and demanding “Palestinian right of return.”Israel, according to the petitions, has no right to exist in its current form.Invariably, the question of what should happen to the Jews is left conve-niently open ended and clearly unanswered.

I was disturbed to see that a reputable Western institution employedprofessors who boycott Israeli institutions in a judgment not based on merit.Based on merit, I should have considered Jerusalem’s Hebrew University—which outranked University of Warwick.5 But I wanted an Englisheducation.

I asked myself how a Western academic institution could embracethose individuals who insisted on continuing the traditional racist antisemit-ism in which Jews were boycotted as a group, whether in the Middle Agesor in 1930s Germany, where Jews’ shops were boycotted and Jews wereexpelled from European universities. Could it be that those who, seventyyears ago, would be defined as antisemites are now embraced by academia,under the manipulative guise of human rights activists?

3. http://www.palestinecampaign.org/Index5b.asp?m_id=1&l1_id=2&l2_id=10.

4. http://www.bricup.org.uk/documents /Gaza/DeclarationSignatories .html;http://www.bricup.org.uk/why.html; http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/16/gaza-israel-petitions; http://Israel-academia-monitor.com/index.php?type=large_advic&advice_id=121&page_data[id]=178&the_session_id=2aa78d18972c159c8b9ec8575213547a&cookie_lang=en; http://boycottzionism.wordpress.com/category/boycott-divestment-sanctions/page/33/.

5. http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/top-400.html.

2011] REMEMBRANCE OF WARWICK DAYS 609

When I petitioned the politics department for an alternative professor, Iwas immediately denied. They were unwilling to understand that an Israelistudent working under Professor Pratt would be equivalent of a black stu-dent working under the KKK. Had I been a member of a recognized minor-ity group, the university would have resolved the issue and allowed me towork under a different professor; it would also have stated that the univer-sity rejects all forms of racism and discrimination, as noted in its Charter ofStatutes.6 This option, however, was ignored by PAIS.

I am not saying that all British people are racist, as most are certainlynot. Neither am I saying that British academic institutions are inherentlyracist and antisemitic. But there is an culture—an ambiance—within theUK that permits discrimination against Jewish Israelis in favor of currentpolitics. This ambiance is not only wrong, but it also condones excludingJews. Most infuriating is that the university never reprimanded ProfessorPratt. That a university defends those who seek to discriminate against anation, and employs those who discriminate and silences students of a cer-tain demographic, is tragic. If some elements of British academia are sayingyes to discrimination according to religion and nationality, what does thissay about the system and the so-called human rights activists?

After months of correspondence, participation in a video conferencewith the university’s Complaints Committee, and fighting against the polit-ics department for nearly a year, I was able to persuade the university thatwhat had I had endured was indeed unjust. When some cosmetic changeswere made to my dissertation, and it was re-marked by three professors, Iwas finally awarded the doctoral distinction I deserved from a year earlier,when Professor Pratt marked me down.

It is unfortunate that Warwick University failed to listen to the wordsof pro-vice-chancellor Susan Brassnett. In 2005, Ms. Brassnett said that theIsraeli boycott was “wrong, bigoted and racist.”7 Had the university heededher statement,8 Warwick would not find themselves in the media todayaddressing concerns of racism and antisemitism. And I would not have losta year of academic life fighting for nothing less than the equal rights ofIsraeli citizens.

6. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/services/gov/calendar/section2/charterstatues.http://www2.

7. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/higher/susan-bassnett-this-boycott-is-wrong-bigoted-and-racist-526403.html.

8. http://www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=2829.


*Smadar Bakovic, who holds a master’s in international relations, is the authorof Tall Shadows: Interviews with Israeli Arabs (United Press of America, 2006).She has worked with the Jacob Blaustein Institute and the American Jewish JointDistribution Committee and participated in EuroMed and several Israeli-Palestinianconferences. Bakovic thanks Stella Aniagyei, PhD, for her helpful suggestions onthis essay. You can reach Smadar Bakovic at [email protected].

Die Linke and the Left

Sebastian Voigt*

Recently, a small but audible segment of the German left considers thecriticism of antisemitism and equally of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanismas central to the renewal of a progressive view of modern society.1,2 Thisincludes support of Israel, which is in direct opposition to the mainstreamleft.3

The emergence of a pro-Israel left is connected to developments inGerman society after the reunification in 1990. The discussions within theleft have to be regarded as a result of the profound political changes thattook place at the time. The reunification was seen by many leftists as areversal of the outcome of the Second World War. The reunification ofGermany coincided with a wave of pogroms and racist attacks against for-eigners, asylum seekers, and Jews. Consequently, the fear of a Fourth Reichand with it the fear of a reemergence of German imperialism surfaced. In

1. See the English version of the homepage of Die Linke, http://dielinke.de/politik/international/english_pages/ (accessed May 7, 2011); see also Dan Hough,Michael Koss, and Jonathan Olsen, The Left Party in Contemporary German Polit-ics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

2. See the homepage, http://www.european-left.org/ (accessed May 7, 2011).3. For this trend, see the article by Jeffrey Herf, “Fresh Air in Central Europe,”

The New Republic, August 2010, http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/77228/fresh-air-in-central-europe (accessed May 7, 2011). A good summary of the histori-cal genesis of this pro-Israel leftist position can be found in an interview with theAustrian researcher and Stop-the-Bomb activist Stephan Grigat: Jens Misera,“Communism, Anti-German Criticism and Israel. An Interview with Stephan Gri-gat” (first published in Israel Nachrichten, the German daily newspaper, in TelAviv in 2004; first published in English at http://info.interactivist.net in 2005);http://www.cafecritique.priv.at/interviewIN.html (accessed May 7, 2011).

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retrospect, these fears were unfounded and proved to be completely errone-ous. Nevertheless, the misguided fears were a direct consequence of a deci-sive rupture in German and European history. The decline of the SovietUnion and the end of the Cold War caused a collapse of the worldview ofmany leftists, even if they never supported Soviet-style communism. Theapparent victory of capitalism and of liberal democracy turned the estab-lished ideology of leftist thinking on its head and caused a fundamentaldisorientation.

At the time, a debate about the history of the left and its mistakes madea cautious stand, and a small segment of the German left began to deal self-critically with anti-Zionism, anti-imperialism, and their relationship to thestate of Israel. Several leftist magazines supported the second Gulf War in1990/91.4 More members of the left even supported the war against theTaliban after 9/11 and some unexpectedly had supported the overthrow ofthe Hussein dictatorship in Iraq in 2003.5

BAK SHALOM

These changes within left-leaning groups, however, did not affect DieLinke fundamentally until 2007, when a group called BAK Shalom wasfounded with the purpose of exposing and combating antisemitism, anti-Zionism, anti-Americanism, and what was termed regressive anticapitalismwithin Die Linke.6

Although I have never been a member of Die Linke, I was in touchwith many party members. In addition, I received a scholarship from theRosa Luxemburg Foundation, which is closely linked to Die Linke.7 I wasmyself a founding member of BAK Shalom, wrote articles, and gave talks

4. The most important leftist magazine at this time was (and still is) konkret. Ithad a long and difficult debate about the Second Gulf War but some authors sup-ported the war, which led to the loss of half the readership. See the konkrethomepage, http://www.konkret-verlage.de/kvv/kvv.php (accessed May 7, 2011).There was also an extensive discussion in the left in general; see, for example,Klaus Schonberger and Claus Kostler, Der freie Westen, der vernunftige Krieg,seine linken Liebhaber und ihr okzidentaler Rassismus oder wie die Herrschaft derneuen Weltordnung in den Kopfen begann (Grafenau: Trotzdem-Verlag, 1992).

5. The most important book for the discussion was Jihad und Judenhass byMatthias Kuntzel. The book was translated into English: Matthias Kuntzel, Jihadand Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11 (NY: Telos Press Pub-lishing, 2007).

6. See the English version of the declaration of principles by BAK Shalom,http://bak-shalom.de/index.php/english (accessed May 7, 2011).

7. See the English version of the homepage of Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung,http://www.rosalux.de/english/foundation.html (accessed May 7, 2011).

2011] DIE LINKE AND THE LEFT 613

about antisemitism and anti-Americanism. Despite considering myself quiteliberal, I was consequently called an agent of imperialism, a Zionist traitor,and a neoliberal racist. Nevertheless, BAK Shalom managed to make thisdiscussion that had been going on for several years a part of the overallframework of Die Linke. BAK Shalom received considerable media atten-tion and for some time I was so optimistic that I believed it might be possi-ble to substantially influence the discourse within Die Linke.8

Unfortunately, this was not to be. I was obviously too optimistic or mayhave been too naive—as I was often told from the very beginning.9

CORE IDEOLOGY

The fundamental principle of Die Linke is anti-imperialist, bothovertly and covertly antisemitic, and adamantly opposed to the existence ofIsrael. This ideology has achieved predominance in Die Linke. The mostrecent evidence of this ideology was revealed during the provocation on theMavi Marmara on May 31, 2010, when a commando of the Israeli defenseforces stormed the ship after the captain refused to stop it. Nine people werekilled in the ensuing struggle. Two current and one former member of theGerman Bundestag were on board the Mavi Marmara. All—Norman Paech,Annette Groth, and Inge Hoger—are members of Die Linke. They werearrested by the Israeli army, but released shortly thereafter.

It is noteworthy to look at what happened when they returned to Ger-many. They were not taken to task by Die Linke for cooperating with afascist organization; neither did they have to justify their support for radicalIslamists, who are well known to be reactionary to the very core and whoblatantly trample on the most basic human rights—not to mention women’srights. The chairwoman of Die Linke, Gesine Lotzsch, instead expressedpride in their so-called mission.10 The only voice from within Die Linkethat criticized the actions of her colleagues was Petra Pau’s, the vice presi-

8. Members of BAK Shalom had several articles in leading newspapers. SeeSebastian Voigt and Benjamin Kruger, “Let the Left Go Forward,” Jerusalem Post,December 9, 2009, or Sebastian Voigt, “An Israels Seite,” Der Tagesspiegel, May5, 2008.

9. A discussion between Jan Gerber and the author was published in the Ger-man leftist weekly Jungle World. Sebastian Voigt, “Sich jetzt endlich einmischen”and Jan Gerber, “Austreten, aber schnell,” Jungle World 23, June 5, 2008.

10. See Miriam Hollstein and Thomas Vitzthum, “Wir sind stolz auf Ihren Ein-satz,” Welt Online, June 2, 2010, http://www.welt.de/die-welt/politik/article7879320/Wir-sind-stolz-auf-Ihren-Einsatz.html (accessed May 7, 2011).


dent of the German Parliament.11 She faced a storm of criticism from withinDie Linke afterward.

Paech, Groth, and Hoger call themselves “survivors of the Israeli mas-sacre” and went on a propaganda tour through various German cities inorder to tell the story of their heroism firsthand. During one of those events,Paech, the former member of parliament and a retired professor of law,went so far as to suggest that the next Gaza Freedom Flotilla should beaccompanied by German maritime forces, which patrol the Lebanese bor-der. If this request were to be carried out, it would de facto amount to usingthe German military against Israel. The audience loudly roared in responseto this suggestion. One member of the audience was so fired up that heexpressed his desire to hit the “fascist state of Israel” next time; Paechcalled that “an idea.”12 It needs to be emphasized that this scandalousresponse was made by a former member of the German parliament and theformer foreign policy expert of a legitimate German party, which is repre-sented in the Bundestag.

Alas, statements like these are merely the culmination of a phenome-non that has been in the works for some time. Consider that WolfgangGehrcke, a member of the Bundestag of Die Linke, wanted to invite repre-sentatives of Hamas to a conference in 2006. Fortunately, they were deniedentry visas to Germany.13 Many members of Die Linke consider Hamas asthe legitimate, democratically elected government of the Palestinians.Hamas’s ideological and highly undemocratic structure does not raise thered flag within Die Linke and its virulent antisemitism is convenientlyignored.

During the Lebanon war in 2006, Christine Buchholz, a hardcoremember of Die Linke and a member of the Bundestag, referred to Israel andthe United States as warmongering countries, noting that “Hezbollah repre-sents, along with the peace movement in Israel and the international antiwarmovement, the opposite part of the conflict. This is the position I am hold-

11. Petra Pau wrote an open letter to the Jewish community in Bremen, inwhich she criticized the members of Die Linke who were on board the ship,http://www.swr.de/report/-/id=6636856/property=download/nid=233454/mvqbrq/index.pdf (accessed May 7, 2011).

12. This “event” was recorded by radio journalists of the independent stationFreies Sender Kombinat (FSK) in Hamburg. Afterward, they produced a 60-minuteradio program Wie antisemitisch ist die Linkspartei? (How Antisemitic is the LeftParty?). The program can be heard online at http://www.freie-radios.net/portal/content.php?id=35000 (accessed May 7, 2011).

13. See Ulrich W. Sahm, Nahostkonferenz im Berliner Reichstag: Hamas-Sprecher erhalt kein deutsches Visum, hagalil.com, October 23, 2006, http://www.hagalil.com/01/de/index.php?itemid=23 (accessed May 7, 2011).


ing as well.”14 Buchholz went on to define the “demonization” of Hezbol-lah as one of the “most egregious prejudices” of the media that allegedlytook place during the war. For a politician of the left to say that she sideswith the terrorist organization of Hezbollah is almost beyond belief, but isundeniable proof of very crucial shifts in leftist politics and its ideology.

THE UNDERLYING REASONS

There are several explanations for the driving forces of the bottomlesshatred against Israel within the left. One key factor is anti-imperialism,which is defined by a dichotomous view of the world. According to thisworldview, the world and society are split in two opposing groups: onegroup wants peace and the other group wants to pursue imperialism; inother words, there is an exploiting First World and the exploited ThirdWorld. This is as simplistic a concept of the complexity of modern societiesas one can imagine, and inherently and inevitably leads to the personifica-tion of social relations. One can consequently easily pinpoint the personsresponsible for exploitation and oppression. The results are wild conspiracytheories for all those who refuse to use knowledge and rationality in under-standing the complex world we are living in. By employing old, deeplyentrenched prejudices, Jews are perceived as those pulling the strings; Israelis seen as the spearhead of Western imperialism in the Middle East and asan artificial state that is a foreign object in the organic body of Arabsocieties.15

14. The quote in German is: “Auf der anderen Seite stehen in diesem Konfliktdie Hisbollah, die Friedensbewegung in Israel und die internationale Antikrieg-sbewegung. Das ist die Seite, auf der auch ich stehe.” Interview with ChristineBuchholz by Rudiger Gobel, “Im Krieg muss sich Die Linke positionieren. DieDamonisierung der Hisbollah ist Teil der Kriegsfuhrung,” Junge Welt, August 15,2008. It can be read online at http://www.achse-des-friedens.de/aktionen_lk05.htm(accessed May 7, 2011).

15. Moishe Postone has written extensively about the criticism of antisemitismand the relation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism. See his classic essay, “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism. Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust,’ ”New German Critique 19, Winter 1980, 97-115, and the interview with him byMartin Thomas, “Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the Left,” February 5, 2010,http://www.workersliberty.org/story/2010/02/05/zionism-anti-semitism-and-left(accessed May 7, 2011).


COMMUNIST IDEOLOGY

The roots of this ideology in Die Linke are twofold. The first one is thecommunist ideology and the politics of the German Democratic Republic(GDR) toward Israel. The GDR was not an antisemitic country per se,although it had several anti-Zionist campaigns that made ample use ofantisemitic stereotypes. The so-called Merker trial in the mid 50s—duringwhich Paul Merker and other leading members of the Communist Partywere convicted of having collaborated with Israel and the United States, the“imperialistic archenemies”—is but one example. The GDR considereditself to be an anti-fascist state that engaged in the self-righteous self-decep-tion of having eliminated the roots of fascism by nationalizing the bigindustries and by expropriating the reactionary Prussian landowners.16 Thehegemonic notion of fascism in the GDR stemmed from the orthodox com-munist view expressed in model fashion by Georgi Dimitrov in the mid’30s. Fascism in power, he said, is “the open terrorist dictatorship of themost reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements offinance capital.”17

If fascism is regarded as the uppermost system of capitalistic dictator-ship, the ideology of antisemitism has to be put on the back burner.Antisemitism was not recognized as the core of Nazi ideology but as ameans of distraction by the ruling class to divide the proletariat. Auschwitzand the annihilation of the European Jews were not recognized as rupturesin civilization itself, as Dan Diner has pointed out.18 In the communistcountries of Eastern Europe, Jews were not acknowledged as a distinctgroup of victims; instead, communists and antifascist resistance fighterswere the most important people to be memorialized. In this delusion, anadequate research of the Holocaust never took place. In addition, the GDRdid not see any reason for normal relations with Israel, and rejected allclaims for compensation by Holocaust survivors. The continued antisemit-ism after 1945, which was very much alive in a large part of the population,

16. See the monumental work by Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Pastin the Two Germanys (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 69-105.

17. Georgi Dimitrov, The Fascist Offensive and the Tasks of the CommunistInternational in the Struggle of the Working Class against Fascism. Main Reportdelivered at the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International,August 2, 1935, http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/08_02.htm (accessed May 7, 2011). See also Thomas Haury, Antisemitismus vonlinks. Kommunistische Ideologie, Nationalismus und Antizionismus in der fruhenDDR (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 293-455.

18. Dan Diner (ed.), Zivilisationsbruch. Denken nach Auschwitz (Frankfurt amMain: Fischer Verlag, 1996).


was never addressed or dealt with because—according to the ideology oforthodox communism—the socialist nations were seen as the true winnersof history, bringing progress to the world.

Next to the historical context of the Cold War and the strong relation-ship of the Soviet bloc with the Arab states, this continued ideology plays amajor role in explaining the undiluted ferocity of anti-Zionism and theenduring comparison and equation of Israel with Nazi Germany in theGDR. This is not a legitimate form of political criticism, but is instead afierce form of antisemitic anti-Zionism.19 Such pernicious hatred of Israel,derived from the orthodox communist ideology, is alive and well in a largepart of Die Linke to this day.

ANTI-ZIONISM OF THE GERMAN LEFT

The other justification of hatred of Israel in Die Linke is to be found inthe history of the radical left in West Germany. Its relation to Israel differsfrom those of the GDR. Until the Six-Day War, the majority of leftists inWestern Germany had a pro-Israel attitude. The tremendous historical shiftafter that decisive conflict unleashed a fierce hatred of the Jewish state,which in turn became an integral part of left identity. This hatred has all theattributes of the pathological. Israel was not regarded anymore as the social-ist experiment with its kibbutzim and its egalitarian ethos, but was turnedinto a country of oppressors—by no less than the previous murderous per-secutors. It was hence called a racist and occupying power that deprived thePalestinians of their human rights and of their national homeland.20

This hostility toward Israel can only be understood in the context ofthe widespread romanticism of revolution itself. Since Western democracieshad given up on revolutions and since the proletariat—which was supposedto be the carrier of the revolutionary banner—was ignorant of its historicalobligation, the longing for a revolution had to be transferred to the ThirdWorld. The ideology of tiermondisme was on the rise, and the left began tosupport all kinds of national liberation movements in the Third World as aredirection activity, a transference of the ersatz for what was missing undertheir very own noses. Some groups even supported the Khmer Rouge inCambodia. But first and foremost, the Palestinians became the main object

19. See Sebastian Voigt, “Das Verhaltnis der DDR zu Israel,” in Dossier “60Jahre Israel,” ed. Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, May 2008, http://www.bpb.de/themen/XEBFIJ,0,0,Das_Verh%E4ltnis_der_DDR_zu_Israel.html,(accessed May 7, 2011).

20. See Martin W. Kloke, Israel und die deutsche Linke. Zur Geschichte einesschwierigen Verhaltnisses (Frankfurt am Main: Haag + Herchen, 1994), 65-81.


of solidarity. Their terror attacks were justified as the expressions of theoppressed underdog fighting against a powerful enemy. The Palestiniansneatly fitted into the leftist cult of the noble guerillero. Leftist radicalgroups like the Rote Armee Fraktion even received military training in Pal-estinian camps; leftist Western German groups went so far as to commitantisemitic crimes. On November 9, 1969, the 31st anniversary of the Nightof Pogroms of 1938, a group called Tupamaros Westberlin placed a bombin front of the Jewish Community Center in Berlin and justified this attackas a necessary reaction to the so-called “fascist” crimes committed by Zion-ists and to express solidarity with the fighting fedayin as the avant-garde ofworldwide revolution.21

SECONDARY ANTISEMITISM

In addition to these explanations, it is obvious that both former Eastand West Germany cannot be compared to other countries. When all is saidand done, the fact remains that contemporary Germany is the successor ofNazi Germany. Thus, a specific aspect has to be added to the leftist hostilitytoward Israel in order to explain this particular anti-Zionist antisemitism.22

After 1945, the official expression of traditional antisemitism becametaboo in both Germanys. Unofficially, antisemitism was neverthelessexpressed both overtly and covertly without any restraint. During the fol-lowing decades, the ever-present antisemitic resentment had to find a differ-ent venue to express itself. After the Holocaust, every Jew became thepersonified accuser of the crimes committed by Nazi Germany. Jews wereperceived as an interference to the development of a national identity, dis-ruptive harassers for the positive identification with Germany and its his-tory. They were seen as the permanent accusers of Germans, who, besidescausing them a bad conscience, exploited German guilt by demanding repa-rations. This antisemitism is expertly expressed in the polemic: Germanswill never forgive Jews Auschwitz.23 Eventually, this bizarre and twisted

21. See Wolfgang Kraushaar, Die Bombe im judischen Gemeindehaus(Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2005).

22. See Lars Rensmann, Kritische Theorie uber den Antisemitismus: Studien zuStruktur, Erklarungspotential und Aktualitat (Hamburg: Argument Verlag, 2001),231-287. See also Samuel Salzborn, Antisemitismus als negative Leitidee derModerne: Sozialwissenschaftliche Theorien im Vergleich (Frankfurt am Main:Campus Verlag, 2010), 317-342.

23. This is how the journalist Henryk M. Broder put it. See Henryk M. Broder,Der Ewige Antisemit. Uber Sinn und Funktion eines bestandigen Gefuhls (Frank-furt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1986), 125. See also Andrei S. Markovits, “A New(or Perhaps Revived) ‘Uninhibitedness’ toward Jews in Germany,” Jewish Political


thinking resulted in the externalization of German guilt. Nazis were conse-quently revealed everywhere, but most specifically in Israel. In due course,Jews were and still are accused of having learned nothing from the Holo-caust and of acting like Nazis. On the other hand, Palestinians are consid-ered to be the new Jews, the victims of the former victims. By demonizingand “Nazifying” Israel, opposing its existence creates the opportunity forGerman leftists to construct an anti-fascist continuity for themselves and tofight the anti-fascist battle that their Nazi parents and grandparents neverfought.

The advantage of this secondary antisemitism to German leftists canbe observed on an individual, psychological level (Western Germany) aswell as on a collective level (Eastern Germany). The defamation of Israel asa fascist country and of Zionism as a fascist ideology conveniently strength-ens anti-fascist self-deception. Because antisemitism was never recognizedfor the core evil it was, and fascism was seen merely as a different kind ofcapitalistic oppression, the Holocaust was not recognized as the worst geno-cide ever committed in the history of all of humanity, and consequently lostits abominable horror.

The most common expression of current manifestations of secondaryantisemitism is anti-Zionism. Although both ideologies are not identical,they do overlap to a large extent. According to a dictum by Leon Poliakov,Israel has become the Jew among all nations; it serves as the collectiveJew.24 This antisemitic anti-Zionism is not exclusive to the German left, butit expresses itself in Germany in its most unadulterated form.

IDEOLOGICAL IGNORANCE

The ignorance about the destructive importance of ideologies seems tobe a blind spot of a leftist wordview. This critical blind spot is repeated inthe leftist attitude toward Islamism. Evident in Die Linke, it has gained agreater significance during the last few years. In the past decades, the Ger-man left supported various so-called national liberation movements, butmainly secular ones. The PLO or the PFLP were supported, but nowadaysHamas—a fanatically religious and oppressive organization—is supported.

Studies Review 18:1-2, Spring 2006, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, http://www.jcpa.org/phas/phas-markovits-s06.htm (accessed May 7, 2011).

24. For the relationship of anti-Zionism and antisemitism, see Leon Poliakov,Vom Antizionismus zum Antisemitismus (Freiburg: ca ira Verlag, 1992).


This development was recently labeled the leftist-jihadist “Querfront”(cross front) by the German journalist Ivo Bozic.25 Some parts of Die Linkeopenly proclaim the collaboration with radical Islamic groups against the“U.S. Empire” and its ally, Israel. Asked how they could possibly cooperatewith radical Islamic organizations and fascist groups, the parliamentarianmembers of Die Linke either claimed that they didn’t know who had organ-ized the Gaza Freedom Flotilla or they audaciously denied that fascist orIslamist groups had indeed participated. In the most benign interpretation,one might consider this naive. It is much more probable that the collabora-tors of radical Islamists know exactly what they are doing.

A particular convergence of orthodox leftist and Islamist ideology isobvious. Both share an anti-imperialist ideology, a deep hatred of Israel andof the United States, and the dystopian yearning for a simple, pre-modernworld. Both of these ideologies reject globalization and financial capital assymbols of the exploitative capitalist society; both tend to simplify the com-plexity of the modern world into a clear-cut black and white without shadesof gray; and both feel morally superior and self-righteous. They deludethemselves in thinking that they fight for a higher cause and that they arealways on the side of the global underdog and the oppressed masses. On aglobal level, the leftist-jihadist collaboration manifests itself in the allianceof Venezuela and Iran, the self-proclaimed socialism of the 21st century,and the reactionary dictatorship of the mullahs.

CONCLUSION

Die Linke cannot and must not be dismissed as an irrelevant radicalfringe of the German political spectrum. That would be the height of irre-sponsibility. Because of the lack of political restrictions, Die Linke oftenexpresses a widespread anger mixed with hatred toward Israel more openlythan the mainstream parties would dare to. The many incidents ofantisemitic anti-Zionism among politicians of all parties are shocking,26 butonly parliametary members of Die Linke could participate in the Gaza Free-dom Flotilla and still be supported by the party leadership. In no other partyis the ingrained hatred of the left as rampant. In regard to Israel and theconflict in the Middle East, Die Linke may almost appear to be the avant

25. See Ivo Bozic, “Die Entstehung der Mavi-Marmara-Linken,” Jungle World31, August 5, 2010; http://jungle-world.com/artikel/2010/31/41448.html (accessedMay 7, 2011).

26. For a profound analysis of antisemitism in the political culture in Germany,see Lars Rensmann, Demokratie und Judenbild. Antisemitismus in der politischenKultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Wiesbaden: Verlag fur Sozialwissen-schaft, 2004).


garde of German society. I do hope that this is an overly pessimistic inter-pretation, and I would gladly be proven wrong. Still, I cannot avoid thenagging fear that my presumptions are not totally over the top. The follow-ing incident shortly after the Mavi Marmara was taken over by the IDFmight be an indication. The German secretary for development, DirkNiebel, was refused entry into the Gaza strip by Israeli authorities. Eventhough it is widely known that Israel prohibits official visits by secretariesto Gaza to avoid legitimizing the Hamas government, the GermanBundestag passed a unanimous resolution condemning Israel’s actions,including the blockade of Gaza strip.27 Even conservative politicians whoare in general considered to be pro Israel praised Die Linke.28 This resolu-tion can only be interpreted as proof that all German political partiespresented a united front against Israel. Needless to say, this new and alarm-ing development undeniably strengthened Hamas.

The debate within Die Linke is not yet over and done with.29 Theeventual development will be crucial not only for people on the left in Ger-many but in all Europe.

*Sebastian Voigt is a PhD candidate in history at the University of Leipzig andholds a Hans-Bockler-Stiftung scholarship. This paper was presented at Yale’sYIISA Global Antisemitism conference August 23-25, 2010, New Haven,Connecticut.

27. For the precise wording of the petition dating from June 30, 2010, see http://dipbt.bundestag.de/dip21/btd/17/023/1702328.pdf (accessed May 7, 2011).

28. The parliamentarian of the conservative CDU, Philipp Missfelder, praisedthe hardcore leftist member of Die Linke, Wolfgang Gehreke, for sharing commonground concerning the Gaza blockade. The original quote in German is: “Selbstwenn in der Assendarstellung haufig der Eindruck entsteht, dass die Linksparteigrundsatzlich anderer Meinung sei, so glaube ich doch, Herr Gehrcke, dass geradeauch die Wortbeitrage, die Sie schon an verschiedenen Stellen abgegeben haben,keinen Zweifel daran lassen, dass Sie sich auf einem ahnlichen, gemeinsamenBoden befinden, wie wir das tun,” http://philipp-missfelder.com/de/Politik/Reden/70/35_Rede_im_Deutschen_Bundestag/artikel,535,1,1.html (accessed May 7,2011).

29. See Samuel Salzborn, “Die Linkspartei hat ein Antisemitismusproblem,”Welt Online, June 8, 2010, http://www.welt.de/debatte/kommentare/article7957984/Die-Linkspartei-hat-ein-Antisemitismusproblem.html (accessed May 7, 2011).

What My Daughter’s Friend andAmbassador Gutman Need to Know

Richard Landes*

One of my daughters recently wrote me about a friend who thoughtthat “most of the Muslim antisemitism in Europe wasn’t based on theirdislike of what is going on in Israel and not so much on religion.” I knewthis belief was widely held not only by anti-Zionists, but also by liberals ingeneral, including Jews. It includes the widely held assumption that suicidebombings were a response to the despair that Palestinians felt because ofhow Israel treated them. It is also directly related to the problem of“Islamophobia is the new Antisemitism,” in which speaking of Muslimantisemitism becomes a new form of racist antisemitism. Of course, I didnot expect a Jewish U.S. ambassador to make those kinds of remarks, whichis just what Howard Gutman said to a group of Jewish lawyers in Belgium:

What I do see as growing, as gaining much more attention in the newspa-pers and among politicians and communities, is a different phenomena. . . It is the problem within Europe of tension, hatred and sometimeseven violence between some members of Muslim communities or Arabimmigrant groups and Jews. It is a tension and perhaps hatred largelyborn of and reflecting the tension between Israel, the Palestinian Territo-ries, and neighboring Arab states in the Middle East over the continuingIsraeli-Palestinian problem.

Either the good ambassador has no awareness of just how paranoid,genocidal, and depraved Muslim antisemitism is, or he is contemptuous inhis lack of standards. He would never excuse virulent Jewish hatred for

623


Palestinians “merely” on the basis of the fact that Palestinians target Israelichildren, dance in the street when they succeed, and display exhibits honor-ing the dead Jews. And yet, somehow, virulent Palestinian hatred isunderstandable.

Of course, the actual situation differs radically from this benign con-tempt. Most of this regional tension is a product of the mainstream [news]media (MSM), both ours and theirs. Virtually none of the people who hateIsrael have seen this matter up close: their impressions and beliefs aboutwhat’s happening are the product of what they read in the media, andreports from activists who document the “apartheid” ways.

The argument, of course, can work inversely: Palestinians have pro-duced a constant stream of lethal narratives describing Israelis as baby-kill-ers, and have spread the virus throughout the Muslim world. Thesenarratives inspire suicide bombers and their cheering supporters, and theviolence that Israel does against the Palestinians—from targeted killings tothe separation barrier, to the Gaza blockade responding directly toantisemitic propaganda.

Because the Western mainstream news media has focused some of thispropaganda, people, including my daughter’s friend, have formed beliefsthat are based on the television images and justify their disdain. “No won-der French Muslims hate you,” the French Christians say to their FrenchJewish co-citoyens; “look at what your brethren in Israel do to their cousinsin Palestine.” To grant the Palestinians and other Muslims permission tohate the Jews reveals unthinking racism: I don’t really expect anythingremotely rational or balanced from these folks. If you piss them off, youdeserve their rage.

The MSM not only report lethal narratives as news, but omit reportingthe hatreds that inspired such narratives. In the summer of 2000, the PA wasblasting hatred of Israel. If the MSM were surprised by Arafat’s CampDavid “no,” it’s because they ignored what he and his friends were sayingin Arabic. On the contrary, driven by a belief that peace was around thecorner, they felt that dwelling on such bad news would queer the peaceprocess. Nor did the Oslo war make a difference. Sheikh Halabiya gave asermon calling on Muslims to “slaughter the Jews everywhere.” WilliamOrme wrote a piece on Palestinian incitement in which he quoted Halabiyasaying: “Labor, Likud, they’re all Jews.”

As a result, the ferocious strain of antisemitism in Palestinian irreden-tism transferred easily from the mufti’s contribution to the Final Solution,Nazi propaganda, and helping Nazism flourish in Egypt and Syria, toArafat’s national liberation and Hamas’s apocalyptic paranoia. Nor is thismerely a quirk of journalism, but a widespread practice of the “post-colo-

2011] NEED TO KNOW 625

nial” field of Middle East studies in the wake of Edward Said’s masterpieceof cognitive warfare forbidding Westerners from othering Muslims.

Yet, what are we to make of crowds rallied by the moderate MuslimBrotherhood chant, “One day we will kill all Jews”? Since 2000, Arab andMuslim news media have been awash with gory video depictions of theElders of Zion carrying out their blood sacrifices of innocent Muslim youth.Specialists disagree over whether this is primarily an import from the worstof European hate-mongering, or an indigenous growth with roots in theKoran. European anti-Zionists may like their fantasy that their attitude isnot antisemitic, but in the case of the Arab and Muslim world, the slidefrom opposing Israel to ranting about al Yahud everywhere is effortless.1

Phillip (Mondo) Weiss’s response to Ambassador Gutman offers addi-tional insight. Citing two other comments, Weiss proves Gutman’s thesis bypointing to a study showing that antisemitic incidents in England spikedafter the Mavi Marmara incident. Of course, the near doubling ofantisemitic incidents did not arise in response to Israel’s behavior, but to thereports of them, in which the MSM reported unfiltered anti-Zionist lethalnarratives about the IDF coming down spraying bullets and killing 19peaceful, humanitarian activists. He also omits data showing that, comparedto Arabs, Israelis commit a faction of violence. Weiss, who never met alethal anti-Zionist narrative he didn’t like, probably still believes the initialreports. But unless you are willing to argue that when Israeli soldiers carry-ing paint-gun rifles, defending themselves from a lethal assault by Jihadisposing as activists, kill nine of their assailants, that it justifies a wave ofantisemitism, this case hardly supports Gutman’s analysis. On the contrary,it proves the opposite.

No violent anti-Arab demonstrations exploded on British soil whenLebanese soldiers killed seventy Palestinian refugees in a massive airassault in 2007, or during the last year while the Syrian army killed over3,000 of its own people. If you were to argue that Islamophobia is causedby Muslim behavior, would you not get accused of Islamophobia by thesame people so ready to blame Israel for antisemitism?

All of it is linked to a particularly dangerous form of political correct-ness, in which criticism of Muslims is the new form of antisemitism. As aParisian colleague insisted, “The experience of the Muslims in Europetoday is exactly the same as the Jews a century ago.” Of course, that’s notthe case at all: both in terms of the wildly different behavior of the twominorities, and in terms of how the European elites reacted to their pres-

1. Mohammed’s mission to retroactively supersede and claim the origins ofJudeo-Christian monotheism, then to “correct,” and finally to complete the Jewishand Christian revelations.


ence. By that logic, however, any attack on Islam is immediately compara-ble to an attack on Jews a century ago.

Even those Jewish organizations designed to protect Jews fromantisemitism share this attitude. Berlin’s Zentrum fur Antisemitismus-forschung held a conference whose main theme was the close identity ofIslamophobia and Judaeophobia. In the United States, the Anti-DefamationLeague released only 2.6 percent of 4,269 press releases since 1995 oneither Islamic extremism or Arab antisemitism, of which only .005 werereleased since September 11, 2001—precisely when the threat to Jews fromIslamic extremism dramatically increased. That is almost as small as thepercentage of Jews in the world, or the percentage of the Arab world “occu-pied” by Israel: 0.002.

Which brings us to the dilemma that faces the morally concernedWestern observer. We are faced with two opposing narratives: one in whichthe Muslims/Palestinians are victims who might be forgiven their imperial-ist Israelis hate; and one in which the Israelis are victims, who might beforgiven their resistance to assaults from paranoid, sadistic antisemitism.

Why not toss a coin? Aside from the fact that in so doing one wouldgreatly increase support for the imperialist Zionists to 50 percent, there areserious consequences to misreading this situation.

If I am wrong, and Palestinian hatred is merely a result of the occupa-tion, then Israeli concessions should lessen Palestinian hatred. Of course, ifthe Palestinians really are rational—really want their own state rather thanto destroy Israel, then they should be amenable to making some importantmoves toward reconciliation, such as, for example, cutting off the hateincitement on TV, and resettling their refugees out of the miserable campsthey’ve been confined to since 1948.

If I am right, if Muslim antisemitism is profoundly rooted amongArabs and Muslims today, then it’s another story entirely. Solving the refu-gee problem by allowing these poor victims of war to have a real home isnot on the Palestinian agenda. On the contrary, these refugees are desig-nated victim-weapons in a war of annihilation.

If I am right, then every time Israel makes concessions, it encouragesfurther aggressions. So despite the politically correct paradigm, each timeIsrael engages in anti-imperialist activities—withdrawing from most of theWest Bank (1994-2000), southern Lebanon (2000), and Gaza (2005)—increased aggression occurred.

There is a widespread fantasy that throwing Israel into the maw of thebeast will somehow solve the problem. Ultimately, the dilemma ofantisemitism is not a Jewish but a Christian problem. Granted, the Jewssuffer from antisemitism, but the ultimate price is paid by those foolish

2011] NEED TO KNOW 627

enough to get sucked into the vortex of hatred and paranoia that antisemitespeddle. As any historian of World War II can tell you, if six million Jewswere murdered, more than ten times as many Christians died in thatmadness!

The Arab world in the latter half of the 20th century offers a strikingparallel to Spain in the 16th century. Both worlds had expelled their Jews(Spain in 1492, Arabs in 1948); both experienced a flood of wealth (NewWorld gold and petrodollars); and both failed to parlay that wealth into athriving culture that made life better for its people.

In a recent article, Jeffrey Goldberg tried to acknowledge the problemof antisemitic sentiments pervading the Arab Spring, all the while preserv-ing the belief that “the people of the Middle East are finally awakening tothe promise of liberty.” But the two are intimately related. Indeed, Jude-ophobia is not the problem, but the symptom.

It’s the conspiracy thinking that blames everything on the other—Mus-lims attack Copts? It’s the Jews. Arab Spring turning into Islamist Winter?It’s the Jews. If you’re the BBC, it’s the Jews, aka “outside forces.” Howcan one possibly inaugurate, foster, and sustain a democratic culture of free-dom, one that, in words of Isaiah Berlin, considers it “shameful not to grantto others the freedom one wants to exercise oneself,” without an ability toself-criticize?

Antisemitism is everyone’s problem—my daughter’s friend, Ambassa-dor Gutman, and the Muslims. The sooner well-meaning progressives stopfeeding their antisemitic vulnerabilities and begin critical thinking, thesooner we will see a real Arab Spring—one in which all people can rejoice.

*Richard Landes is an associate professor of history at Boston University and theauthor of several books, including Heaven on Earth (Oxford University Press,2011). He edits The Second Draft and The Augean Stables. This article is repro-duced by permission of the author and originally appeared in The TelegraphDecember 1, 2011, under the title “Muslim Antisemitism, Israel and the Dynamicsof Self-Destructive Scapegoating.”

Antisemitism and the Dutch Soccer Fields

Manfred Gerstenfeld*

In August 2011, the Foundation for the Fight against Antisemitism(BAN)1 took the soccer club ADO to court. On March 20, during a game ofthis top-league club from The Hague against Ajax from Amsterdam, fre-quent chants of antisemitic songs were heard. BAN also claimed thatADO’s speaker had thanked the public for their support. The club’s lawyerdenied this, whereupon the judge remarked that one could hear this on thetape.

ADO’s lawyer stated that his client had done all it could to preventantisemitic chants from being sung in the stadium. He listed measures ADOhad taken—security cameras to find the perpetrators, the employment ofspecial guards, banning certain troublemakers from entering the stadium,and a general prohibition on misconduct, discrimination, and insults. Thelawyer remarked that ADO also takes its players on visits into neighbor-hoods of The Hague in order to tell people there that discrimination will notbe tolerated in the stadium.

BAN’s lawyer observed that the two parties agree that chants such as“horrible cancer Jews” and “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” are not per-mitted. He added that a witness had declared that also other antisemiticchants were sung during the entire game.2 They were aimed at fanatic Ajaxfans who call themselves “The Jews.”

In his decision, the judge wrote that the chants sung during the gameare considered antisemitic, hurtful, and thus inadmissible. The judge addedthat he did not believe the claim by ADO management that they had notheard the songs, as there were 150 special guards in the stadium who werein contact with a “command room.” The judge decided that if during afuture home game there were antisemitic chants in which the word “Jews”

1. Stichting Bestrijding Antisemitisme.2. Kemal Rijken, “Welles-nietes tussen BAN en ADO,” NIW, August 5, 2011.

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was mentioned, ADO’s management would have to take measures to endthese chants and prevent new ones from being sung. If necessary, thiswould include stopping the game.3

A HISTORY OF ANTISEMITISM

The number of antisemitic incidents in the Netherlands has multipliedgreatly since 2000. The singing of antisemitic songs on soccer fields, how-ever, began long before. Hate chants in Dutch stadiums have been sung asfar back as the 1970s. One of these was “Hi, ha, penis of a dog.” Gradually,the chants became more hateful and were heard more often against severalteams.4 For instance, Feyenoord supporters are called “cockroaches.” Yet,as has been remarked, cockroaches are not offended by name calling, whileJews are insulted by antisemitic hate songs.

In its 1999-2000 Annual Report, Tel Aviv University’s Stephen RothInstitute of Antisemitism and Racism noted:

Antisemitic slurs have long become the norm at football matches in theNetherlands. Hissing, slogans and chants such as “Hamas, Hamas, Jewsto the gas” are often heard during games. The spokesperson of the CIV(Center for Information on Football Vandalism) warned that “In footballarenas, things are accepted which would not be tolerated elsewhere.”Even though the authorities, the judiciary and politicians agree that hiss-ing and antisemitic chanting constitute unacceptable behavior, the law isnot being enforced and games are not stopped.5

Among the early major perpetrators were the thousands of RotterdamFeyenoord fans who sang from their stands in games against Ajax: “Gas theJews.”6 The Ajax supporters in turn often sang “Bomb Rotterdam” as areminder of the lethal German bombardment of the town, which led to theNetherlands’ rapid surrender to the invading German army in May 1940.Already in 1999, the public prosecutor had investigated possible punishableacts committed by then-Feyenoord player Ulrich van Gobbel. After his

3. LJN: BR4406, Voorzieningenrechter Rechtbank’s-Gravenhage, 398200/KGZA 11-812, August 9, 2011.

4. Jaap Bloembergen, “Hatelijke leuzen op de tribunes niet uit te roeien,” NRCHandelsblad, October 7, 2003.

5. 1999-2000 Annual Report, Stephen Roth Institute on Antisemitism andRacism, Tel Aviv University, 2000. See also www.tau.ac.il/Antisemitism/asw99-2000/netherlands.htm.

6. Simon Kuper, “Ajax, de joden, Nederland,” Hard Gras 22 (Amsterdam)(March 2000):141.

2011] ANTISEMITISM AND THE DUTCH SOCCER FIELDS 631

team won the national championship, he shouted “Whoever doesn’t jump isa Jew” eight times from the balcony of the city hall to the public below.7

The public prosecutor decided to dismiss the complaint. The prosecu-tion considered that what Van Gobbel said was “improper and unwise” butnot discriminatory; its spokesman explained that, taking into account thecontext in which the remarks were made, there was no criminal act. Theprosecution also took into account that Van Gobbel had apologized. Jorienvan den Herik, the then chairman of Feyenoord, said that he greatly regret-ted Van Gobbel’s behavior.8

HATRED IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

The Royal Dutch Soccer Association (KNVB)9 reported that in theseason 2001-2002 there were 11 games with antisemitic chants shouted.Many examples of soccer antisemitism were listed in a report by the Centerfor Information and Documentation on Israel (CIDI), the leading Dutchorganization in combating antisemitism. The report mentions that the Feye-noord management wanted to remain silent about the antisemitic chantsfrom the club. In November 2002, twenty Feyenoord supporters shouted ata suspect during a court session of the attempted murder of one of theirfriends, “Cancer Jew, you will be killed.”10

In 2002, the CIDI complained about the shouting of “Hamas, Hamas,Jews to the gas” on an “open day” of Feyenoord. The then deputy mayor ofRotterdam, M. W. van Sluis, replied: “I received your letter of 1 August andI share your worries about the shouting of slogans. It is totally unacceptablethat such slogans are being shouted at whatever moment and in whatevercontext.” Van Sluis mentioned that because there were no policemen pre-sent at the gathering, no direct action had been possible, adding that hewould pass the information to the public prosecution and the mayor of Rot-terdam would discuss the issue with Feyenoord and the KNVB.”11

In 2003, during a game between ADO and PSV from Eindhoven, thefans of the latter shouted “Cancer Jew” at the referee. The internal prosecu-

7. “Het openbaar ministerie in Rotterdam onderzoekt mogelijke strafbareuitlatingen van Feyenoord-speler Ulrich van Gobbel,” Trouw, April 30, 1999.

8. Jaaroverzicht antisemitisme in Nederland 1999, CIDI.9. Koninklijke Nederlandse Voetbal Bond.

10. Hadassa Hirschfeld, “Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzichtover het jaar 2002 en de periode 1 januari–5 mei 2003,” CIDI.

11. “Rotterdam belooft CIDI maatregelen tegen voetbalantisemitisme,” CIDI,August 14, 2002.


tor of the KNVB decided not to follow up on the matter.12 In 2004, Feye-noord supporters brought Palestinian flags to an Ajax game. Thereafter, inthe semifinal of the Amstelcup between Ajax and Feyenoord in April 2004,when Israeli or Palestinian flags were banned, Feyenoord fans came to thestadium with flags of the Arab-European League, a radical Arabmovement.13

THE FUTILITY OF COMPLAINT

After several failures to stop the hate chants, CIDI Director RonnyNaftaniel said in 2004 that it was futile to lodge complaints with the author-ities. He mentioned that he had even appealed to the court against the publicprosecutor in the Netherlands concerning extreme expressions of discrimi-nation, which the prosecution did not want to deal with. Naftaniel said, “Ifit were useful, I would put forward a complaint, but if we have to bringproof after the fact, that is not possible . . . are we the people who have toclean up the dirt which the police and the justice authorities leave lyingaround?”14

In the KNVB, doubts were expressed about the effectiveness of anymeasures to be taken in the soccer stadiums. The manager of its competi-tion, Bert van Oostveen, said that all the talk about stopping games didn’tmean anything. “In the end they [the referees] will let the game go on.”15

On many occasions, authorities did nothing; some actually opposedtaking action. In 2004. Peter de Jonge, the mayor of Heerenveen, who rep-resented the Dutch municipalities in the Commission on Soccer Vandalism,said that it would be “a reward to the hooligans” if a game were stoppedbecause of 100 or 200 fans.16 He thus mentioned a substantially lower num-ber of offenders than there frequently are and suggested that the problemshould be ignored. This further illustrates how Dutch authorities indirectlyassisted in the development of racism and lawlessness in the country for along time.


13. Ibid.14. Milco Aarts, “Hooligan baas in stadion,” Telegraaf, September 18, 2004.15. Ibid.16. Ibid.


A RARE INTERVENTION

One of the rare occasions when the authorities took action was in April2002. Supporters of FC Utrecht shouted, in the Amsterdam Arena train sta-tion, such chants as “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas” and “Send them tothe [concentration] camp.” The then Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen issuedan emergency order, and 670 fans were sent back by train.17

In 2004, the Amsterdam Commission for Complaints against thePolice decided that the police had used “excessive force” in executing themayor’s orders. Mayor Cohen replied that he could agree with most of thecommission’s conclusions, adding that in some cases, the police had reactedto the fans’ violence.18

In 2003, the same commission had concluded that the police had usedunnecessary force against the fans of Feyenoord at a game against Ajax. In2004, eight of the complainants received financial compensation from theAmsterdam municipality.19

ATTEMPTS AT REGULATION

The history of hate slogans in Dutch soccer stadiums in the new cen-tury includes frequent complaints, official hesitations, and the announce-ment of measures, which were then often carried out halfheartedly. At theend of 2004, a referee temporarily halted the game between the professionalclubs VVV and Heracles because there were chants of “Hi, ha, penis of adog.” A week later, there was a long debate at the General Assembly of theprofessional soccer clubs about which songs were permissible. A formerreferee suggested that no action should be taken against “Hi, ha, penis of adog,” stating that in the soccer world, this is considered a title of honor.20

In January 2005, a special advisory committee of the professional soc-cer league prepared a list of chants to be forbidden. This list was acceptedby the KNVB. It prohibited all references to prostitutes, illnesses, and geni-tals. Furthermore, insulting remarks about race, belief, or group of the pop-ulation were also forbidden, which means that jungle sounds, bleating ofsheep sounds, hissing, firework noises, and the expression “fucker of goats”

17. “Supporters na roepen leuzen teruggestuurd,” Volkskrant, April 22, 2002.18. “Amsterdamse politie op de vingers getikt,” Volkskrant, September 25,

2004.19. Ibid.20. “Hi-ha-hondenlul is een eretitel,” AD, December 7, 2004.


were prohibited. This list expanded upon one published a year earlier,which had been accepted by the public authorities.21

In September 2004, when ADO played Ajax, the varied chants were sopersistent that the trainer of the Amsterdam club, Ronald Koeman,threatened to remove his players from the field if this happened again.22

The media mentioned that besides what they termed “the usual antisemiticcurses,” there was repeated singing of: “Sylvie is the prostitute of Amster-dam,” a reference to the then-girlfriend—and now wife—of Ajax’s interna-tional player, Rafael van der Vaart.23

After that game, the Dutch soccer authorities announced new mea-sures. At ADO’s next match, the referee told the press that he had beeninformed in writing by the KNVB that in the event of lengthy and insultingchanting, the match should be ended. He had received written instructionsthat references to “sexual organs, serious illnesses and Jews would not betolerated.” There was singing from time to time about the opponent Vitesse:“They are the homos, yes, yes, the homos of Vitesse,” but the referee saidhe had not heard it. Also, when ADO supporters felt the referee had made amistake, they sang another of their classic chants: “Hi, ha, dog’s penis.”The media was of the opinion that “in general, the fans had behaved withinthe borders of what is presently considered acceptable in stadiums.”24

Around that time, CIDI Deputy Director Hadassa Hirschfeld wrote toWim Deetman, the mayor of The Hague, expressing her disappointmentthat the police failed to act against the continual singing of antisemiticchants, which included “Jews have to be gassed.”25

Theo de Roos, a well-known professor of criminal law, commentedthat many of the usual chants are punishable according to two articles ofDutch law. “The first says that nobody may incite somebody else to hate,and the second forbids the racist insulting of a group of the population. ‘AllJews should be gassed’ is undoubtedly punishable.”26

21. “Lijst met verboden spreekkoren,” Telegraaf, January 21, 2005.22. Erik van der Walle, “Niemand durfde ooit een wedstrijd te staken,” NRC

Handelsblad, September 14, 2004.23. Jaco Alberts, “ADO-supporters vinden zichzelf nu ‘lief,’ ” NRC Handels-

blad, September 18, 2004.24. Ibid.25. “CIDI ‘diep teleurgesteld’ in politie en gemeente,” Haagsche Courant, Sep-

tember 14, 2004.26. Milco Aarts, “Hooligan baas in stadion.”


A STOPPED GAME

On October 18, 2004, a match between ADO and PSV was stopped byreferee Rene Temmink. Before it started, ADO fans had already thrownobjects onto buses filled with PSV fans. The speaker warned the publicbefore and during the game, but ADO fans regularly sang hate chants,including “Temmink is the whore of PSV” and “Hamas, Hamas, Temminkto the gas.” When Temmink stopped the game, he had intended to continueit after a cooling-off period. Riots started, however, and Mayor Deetmanthen canceled the game altogether.27

Once soccer fans had seen that in the professional leagues hate songswent unpunished, this seeped down to the lower leagues, where at most itwas mentioned in the local papers. One example, which was even reportedin the national media, happened in a low amateur league in the northeasternpart of the Netherlands. In 2004, Lionel Huizing, a football player—whohas a black mother and a white father—from De Weide, a small club inHoogeveen, was insulted during the entire game by the players of anotherclub, Klazienaveen. The referee stopped the game for a short time in orderto explain to the Klazienaveen captain that this was misconduct, but whenthe game resumed, the insults did not abate.28

A CULTURE CHANGE

Until recently, few effective and consistent measures were enacted tocounter antisemitic hate songs. Tolerating antisemitic chants in the stadiumsfor so long was one manifestation of the Dutch gedoogcultuur—a culture oflooking away from transgressions. This also breeds tolerance for intoler-ance. Partly due to this longstanding culture, it took many years before theKNVB was willing to take action against racist and antisemitic outbursts.Nowadays, this culture has become largely defunct.

By 2011, the public mood was finally ready for a zero-toleranceapproach toward expressions of antisemitism in the stadiums. Thus, public-ity suddenly focused on hate chants at a celebration of ADO supportersafter its victory against Ajax. There, the fans, including ADO players LexImmers and Charlton Vicento, sang with much gusto: “We go chasingJews.” Once again, their target was not actual Jews but the players and fansof Ajax. “Hamas Hamas, Jews to the gas” was also sung; this chant had

27. Robert Misset, “Staking na wangedrag ADO-fans,” Volkskrant, October 18,2004; “Duel ADO-PSV gestaakt na spreekkoren,” NRC-Handelsblad, October 18,2004.

28. “Voetballer doet aangifte van discriminatie,” Volkskrant, October 4, 2004.


already been prohibited by the Supreme Court in 2009.29 The trainer ofADO, John van den Brom, and his assistant, Maurice Steijn, were present atthe party. It was filmed by some of those who attended.

Reactions differed greatly from those during earlier years. The boardof ADO fined Immers heavily. The player offered his apologies, and said:“I had been totally carried away by the euphoria after this special victory. Ihadn’t been aware at that moment of the insulting nature toward a wholegroup of the population. I mixed up a nickname for a group with that of asegment of the population. I regret this. What I did was not permissible andI of course accept the fine which I received.”30

Van den Brom apologized to Ajax. He said: “We are role models. Thiswas a very expensive learning experience for us. If you make a mistake,you have to sit on the blisters. I would have preferred to turn the clock backon this incident.”31 The KNVB decided not to invite Vicento for the youngDutch national team who would play a friendly game against youngGermany.32

GOVERNMENT RESPONSE

Parliamentarian Richard de Mos of the Freedom Party, who is also amember of the Municipal Council in The Hague, condemned the antisemiticchants, submitting parliamentary questions asking for measures againstantisemitic slogans in professional soccer.33 Thereafter, De Mos, an ADOfan himself, received death threats from supporters of the club.

Andre Rouvoet, the leader of the Christian Union party at the time,asked Minister of the Interior Piet Hein Donner how he intended to dealwith the misconduct of ADO. Rouvoet said: “If influential people allow thisto happen, they legitimize it. This illustrates that antisemitism is not only aproblem stemming from Moroccan Muslim youngsters, but it is also unfor-tunately a broader societal problem. This type of reprehensible event at andaround the sport fields is unacceptable. The Hague Alderman KarstenKlein, for instance, should quickly enter into discussions with ADO on howthe club will assume its responsibility.”34

29. Arne Hankel, “Ook Hoge Raad vindt Hamas-leus beledigend,” Elsevier,September 15, 2009.

30. “Geschrokken Immers: Jodenjacht leek mij onschuldig,” AD, March 21,2011.

31. “Voorzitter Ajax: Stop met Joden als geuzennaam,” AD, March 23, 2011.32. “ADO-feestje kost Vicento plek in Jong Oranje,” AD, March 21, 2011.33. “Kamerlid PVV met dood bedreigd door fans ADO,” AD, March 23, 2011.34. “Rouvoet wil Donner horen over ADO-wangedrag,” AD, March 21, 2011.


CIDI asked the director of the KNVB, Ronny Naftaniel, to suspendImmers and Van de Brom. Naftaniel replied: “Even though we know thatthe slogans are against Ajax, it is reprehensible that this should happen onthe back of the Jews. In the past, such insulting slogans had been toleratedquietly in the stadium. Now one also hears them in the streets. That is evenmore reprehensible as incidents are on the increase against synagogues andso are threats and violence against recognizable Jews in the street.”35

A HARMFUL NICKNAME

Uri Coronel, who is Jewish, was the chairman of Ajax in March 2011,but has since resigned. He called on the club’s fans to refrain from using thenickname “Jews” and said, “Our fans are not responsible for people whouse such horrible language. Apparently, however, by their songs, they pro-voke these reactions. They thus should stop [calling themselves Jews].”36

Coronel added that he had even heard members of the business club ofFC Utrecht singing that they “went to chase Jews.” He observed that he hadonce entered the Feyenoord stadium between a double lineup of youngsterswho made the “Heil Hitler” salute; “One cannot even describe this experi-ence,” he said.37

In 2005, there were complaints in a meeting of the Members Councilof Ajax about the nickname “Jews” because it provoked antisemitic reac-tions. The board was requested to take action against its use. The then-chairman John Jaakke asked Coronel to talk to the supporters; to them,Coronel said that this way of presenting Ajax “as a Jewish club is painfuland relates to the Holocaust . . . If Ajax abandons the ‘Jews’ nickname andrelated issues one can also ask others to behave differently.” Before a gamewith the German club Bayern Munchen, a banner with the text “Jews takerevenge for 1945” was removed.38 Coronel’s meeting with the supportersproduced no results.

Coronel’s observations on this issue go back many years. Already in2000, he was quoted as saying: “I have seen things that, if they were filmed,could be compared to Hitler’s Germany at the beginning of the 1930s . . .you arrive by bus at Feyenoord or at The Hague; hundreds of people withhatred in their eyes call out ‘Jews,’ they hiss [as an indication of the gas inAuschwitz] and make the [Nazi] salute.”39

35. “CIDI eist bij KNVB schorsing Van den Brom,” AD, March 21, 2011.36. “Voorzitter Ajax: Stop met Joden als geuzennaam,” AD, March 23, 2011.37. Ibid.38. Jop van Kempen, “Ajax wil van ‘Joden-gedoe’ af,” Parool, January 8, 2005.39. Simon Kuper, “Ajax, de joden, Nederland,” 141.


In 2005, Coronel told this author:

If we were to forbid these Stars of David, we would get riots in return. Ingeneral, the authorities are already happy when there are no fights aftersoccer games. There have been threats to end games, but they didn’t govery far. We have, however, slept too long.

I think this nickname [“the Jews”] started in the 1980s. There wasno logical reason for it. Ajax had the image of a Jewish club which wasnot based on anything. If 50,000 people come to a soccer game andamong them are 500 Jews, that is a lot for us, in particular if we more orless sit on the same tribune, but basically Ajax has never had many Jew-ish members and hardly any Jewish players. We had in the 1960s andearly 1970s two players who had Jewish fathers and were both on theDutch national team, Sjaak Swart and Benny Muller. Swart, however,always denied that he was Jewish. There were also some board memberswho were of Jewish origin. Before the war there had been a Jewish Ajaxplayer, Eddie Hamel, who was on the national team. He died in a concen-tration camp.

We should have objected from the beginning to the nickname, butwe didn’t realize it. Thereafter the hooligans from some other teams,mainly Feyenoord, ADO and FC. Utrecht started to sing antisemitic hatesongs. Our hard-core fans, perhaps 1000 among our 40,000 regular sup-porters, then started to say you cannot take away our “identity.” This is ofcourse nonsense. Gradually more and more Israeli flags and Stars ofDavid appeared in the stadium. At a certain moment, some fans startedputting tattoos of the Star of David on their hands.

After the murder of media maker Theo van Van Gogh in 2004 andthe increasing antisemitism from Muslims, there were more and morevoices asking for the nickname to be abandoned. It didn’t help much eventhough the number of flags diminished.

Then the international publicity about this issue started for instancein The New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and Le Figaroin France. Thereafter we got complaints from Israel that we wereashamed of our Jewish image. When Ajax and supporters with it visitedthere, people loved it and thought that it was a sign of solidarity withIsrael. That didn’t help us because now our fans started saying, “What doyou want? People in Israel love it that we call ourselves Jews!”40

After the ADO court case, Coronel summed up his current position:

It is annoying that Ajax supporters call themselves Jews, but it does nottouch me very much. We should realize that when about thirty years agoIsraeli flags appeared on the tribunes, the Jewish community was proudand not annoyed. It became unacceptable due to the reaction of some of

40. Uri Coronel, personal communication to author.


our opponents. Yet it makes little sense to force Ajax supporters to giveup their nickname. First of all it will not succeed and secondly we shouldconcentrate on fighting against what it apparently provokes and not onthe use of the nicknames.41

A MAYOR’S OPINION

In May 2011, Eberhard van der Laan (Labor), the mayor of Amster-dam, criticized the fans’ use of the nickname “Jews” in an interview. Hesaid that this nickname could result in people coming out against Jews andthat this should be prevented. Van der Laan added that he didn’t have anyillusions about a quick response: “It is a matter of change in behavior,which may take ten years. That does not mean that we shouldn’t start work-ing on it immediately.”42

Robert Flos, head of the Liberal Party (VVD) faction in the Amster-dam Municipal Council, said that Van der Laan should discuss the use ofthe nickname with the Ajax fan club. Flos mentioned that in Amsterdam, anatmosphere is slowly developing that is very polarizing, noting that“homophobia and antisemitism are on the rise.” He also thought that theproblems related to the nickname of “Jew” could take five to ten yearsbefore they were solved.43

Two months earlier, Van der Laan expressed his anger about a T-shirtthat had been designed by a small group of Ajax supporters for the club’scup final against Feyenoord. The shirt, which was offered for sale on a fansite, had a picture of Rotterdam being bombarded with Stars of David. Ithad as text “Aboutaleb, the Jews are coming.” Rotterdam’s mayor, AhmedAboutaleb (Labor), is a Moroccan-born Muslim.44

In September 2011, however, the BAN Foundation wanted to cash inon its success in the court case against ADO, and brought a rapid courtcause claim against Amsterdam Mayor Van der Laan and Ajax in order toforce them to ban the word “Jew” in slogans displayed in the soccer stadi-ums. BAN mentioned chants like “We are super-Jews” or “Those who donot jump are not Jews.” As a reaction to this, the Ajax supporters clubcalled on the fans to bring Israeli flags, scarves, and objects with the Star of

41. Ibid.42. Hugo Logtenberg, “Van der Laan wil ‘Joden, Joden’ verbannen uit de

Arena,” Parool, May 13, 2011.43. “VVD-Amsterdam wil af van term ‘Joden,’ ” NIW, May 18, 2011.44. “Van der Laan boos over anti-Feyenoordshirt,” Parool, March 7, 2011.

“Ajaxfans verwijzen met shirt naar bombardement Rotterdam.” NRC, March 5,2011.


David on them to all games.45 In October 2011, however, BAN withdrewfirst the court case against Van der Laan46 and thereafter also that againstAjax.47

TRADITION OF INSULTING MINORITIES

The antisemitic songs have been heard now for many years by hun-dreds of thousands of people at Dutch football stadiums. The press hasdescribed it as a recurring phenomenon over the years. Occasionally, effortswere made to weaken the songs’ impact. One example of this is loud musicplayed during a game to drown out the chants.48

Frits Barend, a well-known Dutch TV program host, has a long-terminterest in soccer and has produced many programs about it. He mentionedthat the first groups insulted on Dutch soccer fields were black players, aswell as Moroccans.

Barend observed: “There was a Dutch international player who wasalso a Moroccan—Dries Bousatta—who, when he played, songs werechanted such as ‘Your mother has a moustache’ or ‘Your mother is awhore.’ On the tribunes, minorities, homosexuals and referees have beencursed terribly. In the Netherlands, these shouts at various minorities havebeen tolerated for many years.”

He remarked further: “Former black Ajax goalie Stanley Menzo wassubjected to jungle noises from his opponent’s fans. I was once at a cupfinal in The Hague against Ajax where they threw a banana at him in hisgoal and made monkey sounds. I taped and broadcast it. After the game, thechairman of the professional soccer section of the KNVB, Andre van derLouw—a Labor politician—praised the public for their excellent behavior.Van der Louw’s attitude was typical of the mindset of political leaders atthe time.”49

This behavior continued for years. In 2005, there were both antisemiticand anti-black slogans heard during a home game between Ajax and FCUtrecht. Fans shouted “Whoever doesn’t jump is a Jew,” and there were

45. “AFCA: Neem davidsster mee naar ArenA,” AT5, September 24, 2011.46. “Toch geen kort geding VDLaan,” AT5, October 13, 2011.47. “Stichting BAN trekt kort geding tegen Ajax in,” De Pers, October 24,

2011.48. Willem Vissers, “Oplossing voor verbaal geweld: harde muziek,” Volk-

skrant, September 13, 2004.49. Frits Barend, personal communication to author.


hissing sounds. When black player Ryan Babel got the ball, jungle soundswere also heard.50

Looking back, Barend says:

Ajax never liked the use of the nickname “Jews.” One of the chairmen,Michael van Praag, who was of Jewish origin, thought, “Don’t make afuss about it. If you don’t deal with it, it will go away.” I also thought forsome time: “Let’s perhaps not give too much attention to it for a year ortwo perhaps the problem will indeed go away.” It of course didn’t disap-pear, but then the management of Ajax didn’t want to deal with it.

The issue had already started under Van Praag’s predecessor, but ata certain moment, Ajax really got the nickname of the Jewish club, andthe Israeli flag and the Star of David became a kind of symbol. Of course,one can laugh when, after Ajax scored a goal, they sang the Israeli song“Hava Nagila,” but then they went further, into “We are super-Jews andwhoever doesn’t jump isn’t a Jew.” Thereafter, you get reactions fromFeyenoord—“Whoever doesn’t jump is a Jew.”51

MANAGEMENT AT RISK

In describing management’s response to antisemitic chanting, Barendobserves:

When former Ajax trainer Louis Van Gaal’s wife died of cancer, in somestadiums supporters chanted: “Van Gaal had a cancer prostitute.”52 Jour-nalists have also been threatened at times. The throwing of small objectsonto the playing field is common, along with excessive imbibing of alco-hol and the unauthorized use of fireworks in the stadium.

I sat with a colleague of mine at the tribune of honor at PSV inEindhoven when they played against Ajax. There, “respectable people”with suits and ties sang “Cancer Jew” and “He’s a friend of the Jews”when the referee made calls against the PSV team. The same also hap-pened at Feyenoord.

Even when the club management tried to do something about thesethings, they were at risk themselves. If one excluded a fan, he mightthrow stones through one’s window. These hooligans are anonymous in abigger group while the leaders of the fan club always distanced them-selves from the violence.”53

50. Hadassa Hirschfeld, “Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzichtover het jaar 2005 en de periode 1 januari–5 mei 2006,” CIDI, 22.

51. Frits Barend, personal communication to author.52. Milco Aarts, “Hooligan baas in stadion,” CIDI.53. Frits Barend, personal communication to author.


ATTITUDES NOW SEEPING INTO SOCIETY

The authorities’ lack of desire to deal with the recurring racism andantisemitism in the stadiums has allowed the hate songs to gradually seepinto society at large. Once there. it is almost impossible to combat. Theantisemitic chants have spread in various directions elsewhere. At demon-strations against Israel, for instance, the chant “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to thegas” is often sung, mainly by Muslims. There the target is real Jews.

Soccer fans also started to sing the same chants outside of the stadium.The non-Jewish journalist Matthijs Smits relates that he was invited a num-ber of years ago by Jewish friends in Amsterdam for the first evening of thePassover holiday. He entered an electric tram car full of soccer fans of PSV,who were on their way to a game against Ajax. They chanted loudly,“Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas.” Smits said that he did not know whatwould have happened if they had considered him a real Jew.54

Rabbi Binyomin Jacobs, chief rabbi of the interprovincial rabbinate,tells that he, together with a non-Jewish psychologist, once entered a trainfull of Feyenoord supporters. When the fans saw them, they started tochant: “Jews to the gas.” Jacobs said that he had the feeling that this wholetrain of “ordinary Dutchmen” was against them.

“The psychologist shrunk from fear,” the rabbi remarked. “It seemedto me that that reaction wouldn’t help very much, so I feigned that I wasindifferent to it as a sign of strength. One can consider this incident as anact of hooliganism, yet if one of these idiots had attacked us, many morewould probably have followed him.”55

In 2006, The Hague rap group Den Haag Connection (DHC) publisheda song on the Internet titled “Hague Jihad” (Haagse jihad). It included textssuch as “Hamas, Hamas, all Jews to the gas,” “One day you’ll get theHague Jihad on your roof,” and “Cancer Jews.”56

ANTISEMITISM ON THE PLAYING FIELD

There was also direct antisemitism against Jews on the soccer fields.One example was in 2002, when a Jewish youth team of RKAVIC in alower league was physically attacked during a game by a team, mainly con-sisting of Turkish and Moroccan youngsters, from SC Orient in the northern

54. Matthijs Smits, personal communication to author.55. Binyomin Jacobs, “Rabbijn in een polariserende samenleving.” Interview in

Manfred Gerstenfeld, Het Verval (Amsterdam; Van Praag 2009), 175-176.56. Meir Villegas Henriguez, “Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland.

Overzicht over het jaar 2006 en de periode 1 januari–5 mei 2007, ” CIDI, 22-23.


part of Amsterdam; thereafter, they were harassed in the locker rooms.When these SC Orient youngsters also made the Hitler salute, the team wasexpelled from the competition.57

On International Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27, 2008, a textmessage appeared on the video screen at the Vitesse stadium during a gameagainst Ajax. It read, “Hoezee, hoezee, Long live Zyklon B,” referring tothe gas used in extermination camps during the Holocaust.58 A Vitessespokesperson later expressed the club’s regrets and said that fans can sendSMS texts for the video screen. She explained that before being posted,they are checked, but that this particular one had slipped through.59

During that same year, in a professional-league game against RBCfrom Roosendaal, the Belgian player Daniel Guijo-Velasco of HelmondSport made the “Heil Hitler” salute. He was suspended by the KNVB forfive games.60 Velasco apologized the next day.61

The many years of unchecked verbal abuse have also occasionally ledto physical violence. In April 2004, a number of Feyenoord supporters werewounded after a junior-team game against Ajax. Some of the attackers hadtheir faces covered.

In 2004, supporters of the top-league club FC Twente published dataon the Internet about their trip to Groningen for a game against the localclub, illustrated with a picture of a transport of Jews during the Holocaust.It is one among many incidents during that year reported by CIDI.62

In 2005, three fans of Club Cambuur from Leeuwarden were removedfrom the stadium in Emmen after they made a “Heil Hitler” salute and yel-led out racist remarks. They also shouted the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil” sev-eral times.63

57. Hadassa Hirschfeld, “Overzicht antisemitische incidenten Nederland 2001en voorlopig overzicht 2002, CIDI.” See also Marc Kruyswijk, “Steeds vakerHitlergroet,” AD, May 31, 2002.

58. “Antisemitism Worldwide 2008/9,” The Stephen Roth Institute for theStudy of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, 12.

59. “Vitesse betreurt antisemitisme tegen Ajax,” Hakehillot Nieuws, February1, 2008.

60. “Midfielder handed five match-ban for Nazi salute,” International HeraldTribune, December 3, 2008.

61. “Helmond-Sport: taakstraf en schorsing na Hitlergroet,” Omroep Brabant,November 29, 2008.

62. Hadassa Hirschfeld en Agnes van der Sluijs, “Antisemitische incidenten inNederland. Overzicht over het jaar 2004 en de periode 1 januari–5 mei 2005,”CIDI, 27.

63. Hadassa Hirschfeld, “Antisemitische incidenten in Nederland. Overzichtover het jaar 2005 en de periode 1 januari–5 mei 2006,” CIDI, 22.


Later, the identification of a group of Ajax fans with the nickname“Jews” also became known internationally. In 2003, supporters of the Bel-gian team Club Brugge shouted in Amsterdam, “We are going to chaseJews,” saying that ADO supporters joined in with the shouting. During sub-sequent fights with Ajax fans, 100 people were arrested.64

When the top Spanish team Real Madrid came to the Netherlands for aChampions league game in November 2010, part of a group of 200 Spanishfans shouted “Sieg Heil, Sieg Heil” and “Juden Raus, Juden Raus.” Thefans also made the “Heil Hitler” salute. Eleven fans were arrested, eachreceiving a fine of 200 Euro. The Real Madrid fan club paid the fine.65

SOCCER ANTISEMITISM ABROAD

Antisemitism in and around soccer fields manifests itself in manyways in several countries. Already in 1999, the Swiss-based InternationalFederation of Football (FIFA) had condemned the racist actions of theRomanian Soccer Federation Vice President Dumitru Dragomir. Dragomirwas the editor of a publication in which Jews were referred to as “potentialsoap.”66

In 2007, the American Jewish Committee published an overview ofantisemitism related to soccer in a number of countries.67 One extreme caseresulted in a death. After a match between Paris Saint-Germain and HapoelTel Aviv in Paris in November 2006, “a fan of both clubs was chased byabout 150 Paris Saint-Germain supporters. An undercover police officerwho tried to help him was himself attacked and subjected to racial slursabout his black skin color. When the use of tear gas proved insufficient tostop the attackers, the policeman pulled his gun and fired a shot, acciden-tally killing a Paris Saint-Germain fan and wounding another.”68

One among many cases of antisemitism in soccer stadiums in 2011was when top UK team Chelsea played in Malaysia. There were antisemitic


65. “Real Madrid betaalt boetes antisemitische hooligans,” Parool, 18 May2011.

66. “World Soccer Federation Assures ADL Antisemitism Is Unacceptable;FIFA Seeks to Distance the Sport from a Romanian Racist,” Anti-DefamationLeague, August 16, 1999.

67. Yves Pallade, Christoph Villinger, and Deidre Berger, “Antisemitism andRacism in European Soccer,” AJC Berlin Office/Ramer Center for German-JewishRelations, May 2007.

68. Ibid.


chants shouted at its Israeli player Jossi Benayoun.69 Chelsea protested andafterward Malaysia apologized.70 The subject of soccer antisemitism invarious countries is widespread enough to warrant an updated study.

Elements of incidents similar to those in the Netherlands occur else-where in Europe. For instance, after antisemitic insults were made againsttheir club, mostly non-Jewish fans of the London-based Tottenham Hotspurcalled themselves Yiddos, which has led to demands that this be stopped.71

In Poland, soccer hooligans often shout: “Jews to the gas,” ”Kill the Jewishwhores,” or “Hit the Jew on their trap.” Soccer clubs have long ignored this,explaining it as “Polish folklore.” In the summer of 2011, Polish PrimeMinister Donald Tusk said that to stop this was of prime importance forhim.72 Nowhere, however, does a multifaceted situation exist identical tothe Dutch one concerning Ajax.

AN IMPORTANT ISSUE

Antisemitism in the Dutch soccer world is ubiquitous and has hadmany negative consequences. Hate songs, which were once confined to spe-cific areas—mainly stadiums and their environment—have now permeatedthe Dutch public domain. The phenomenon also exemplifies how discrimi-natory attacks directed at Jews intermingle or are followed by aggressionagainst other groups. The text “Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas” expresseseloquently how anti-Israelism and antisemitism go together.

The official reactions to the phenomenon expose how weak the Dutchjustice system has been in implementing existing legislation for a long time.Society is also often more concerned about the police’s behavior than thatof the hooligans or criminals. Both of these topics are outside the scope ofthis essay.

The history of the antisemitic chants at the Dutch soccer fields alsoopens up a window onto Dutch society at large and its long culture of toler-ance for the intolerable. The brutal murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004 byMohammed Bouyeri, a radical Muslim, was a warning sign to Dutch soci-ety at large and also a turning point; yet, it has taken many more years tobegin dealing with the problem on the soccer fields.

69. Dominic Fiffield, “Chelsea object to ‘antisemitic’ abuse of Yossi Benayounin Malaysia,” Guardian, July 28, 2011.

70. “Malaysian FA apologises to Chelsea’s Yossi Benayoun after abuse claim,”Guardian, July 29, 2011.

71. Ivor Baddiel, “ ‘Alarming’ level of antisemitism in football must be tack-led,” The Telegraph, April 14, 2011.

72. “Antisemitismus als Folklore,” TAZ, September 5, 2011.


For a long time, few understood how an issue unrelated to real Jewsmutated into many ugly and antisemitic directions. Even now, some Jewswrite articles claiming that the hate chants have nothing to do withantisemitism—as if that were the crux of the problem.73 Such people lackthe ability to see an issue in its full context.

The history of antisemitism on Dutch soccer fields shows how Jewsare very often drawn into problematic situations against their will. Theymust always be far more on guard against potential risks than the averageDutchman. Simultaneously, the issue illustrates once again how problemsinvolving Jews offer a prism view onto Dutch society.

It is evident that a more detailed analysis of antisemitism and racismon Dutch soccer fields would be important for many reasons. This is soeven if a significant percentage of the hate-mongers are marginal individu-als in society.

*Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is chairman of the Jerusalem Center for PublicAffairs. His background is in chemistry, economics, environmental studies, andJewish studies. He has been an international business strategist for forty years; hisclients have included the boards of several of the world’s largest multinational cor-porations, as well as governments. Gerstenfeld has published twenty books, includ-ing the Italian bestseller Revaluing Italy. His recent book, in Dutch—The Decay:Jews in a Rudderless Netherlands—has sparked a major public and parliamentarydebate in that country, and has had an international impact as well. The research forthis essay was made possible through the support of the Stichting CollectieveMarorgelden Israel (SCMI).

73. Martijn Kleijwegt, “Wangedrag supporters is geen antisemitisme,” Volk-skrant, March 25, 2011.

Was Cesare Lombroso Antisemitic?

Gabriel Cavaglion*

Jewish Italian physician Cesare (Hizkiah Mordecai) Lombroso (1835-1909) was a reformer in modern penology and is considered by many to bethe father of positivist criminology. His writings on race, however, makehim unquestionably antisemitic. Why would a Jew write on antisemitism?

Whether Lombroso was right or wrong is perhaps in the last analysisnot so important as the unquestionable fact that his ideas proved so chal-lenging that they gave unprecedented impetus to the study of the criminaloffender. Any scholar who succeeds in driving hundreds of students tosearch for the truth, and whose ideas after half a century still possess vital-ity, merits an honorable place in the history of thought (Sellin, 1937). Acareful study of Lombroso’s heritage, education, environment, and ambitionyields some rationales for both his attitude toward his fellow Jews and hisinfluential role in penology and criminology. This essay discusses all theseelements in the formation of Lombroso—the scientist and the man.

Lombroso went to secular Italian schools in Verona and Chieri, innorthern Italy. Here, thanks to his astute and idealistic mother, he wasexposed to cultures of the non-Jewish world, “rich in poetry and art, sotypical of distinguished and respectable Jewish families, in an enlightened,scholarly atmosphere, in which Jewish tradition was utterly compatible withrevolutionary ideas” (Drapkin, 1977, 25).

Unlike his mother, his father was God-fearing, fearful and anxious,unskilled, and, as merchant and breadwinner, a failure. He was a man“made happy by a quiet life, study, and reading holy books” (Dolza, 1990,29). His granddaughter, Cesare’s daughter Gina Lombroso, described himas “scholarly, kindhearted, gentle, and mild, but very shy, very religious,awkward, weak, and completely obedient to conservative traditions” (G.

647


Lombroso, 1915). He caused the economic collapse and the loss of the fam-ily’s assets when Cesare was a boy. This character, known in Jewish-Euro-pean satirical literature as a “shlemiel” (Gilman, 1986), would come torepresent the embodiment of traditional Judaism to the adult Cesare and thefocus of his attack, as described below.

As early as age 10, Cesare rebelled against his father in everythingconnected with observance of the commandments, and he renounced faithand ritual. He considered himself a free thinker and a rationalist, adopting aworldview of materialism and skepticism, intermingled with the prevailingliberal humanist ideology of the period, as befitted an enlightened northernItalian Jew. As a telling example, his first name, Cesare, meaning a Romanemperor, is a nickname that he adopted as his formal name. By doing so, heallied himself with ancient Italian tradition and with the Romantic pride ofmodern unified Italy. The names inscribed on his birth certificate, Mordecaiand Hizkiah, would be forgotten.

The tension he felt with religious conventions would remain conspicu-ous throughout his lifetime. For example, when he agreed, past the age of30, to marry a Jewish girl, he refused to consult with family or with amatchmaker, as was the custom then, thus causing great tension between histraditional relatives and himself (Baima Bollone, 1992, 72).

Lombroso grew up in a period of historically fateful transformations:the continued emancipation of the Jews of northern Italy and the assimila-tion of the Jewish middle and intellectual classes into the life of the youngnation, and their support for political movements that identified with insur-gency and the unification of the state (Risorgimento Italiano). Lombrososerved as a military doctor in military prisons in southern Italy (the Calabriaregion), where he encountered an assortment of dialects and cultures. Helater directed a psychiatric hospital, was an academic researcher at the Uni-versity of Torino, and was a political initiator in the People’s Party in thistown (Wolfgang, 1973, 238).

According to Rafter and Gibson in their updated introduction to theCriminal Woman, Lombroso grew up at a time of political and intellectualupheaval, of yearning for the revival, unification, and independence of adivided Italy—the dream of expelling the occupying foreign forces, defeat-ing absolutist regimes, and unifying the Italian peninsula under a parliamen-tary government (in Lombroso and Ferrero, 2004, 15).

Lombroso believed in the leaders of the independence movement.Shocked by the poverty, epidemics, ignorance, and malnutrition of the pop-ulation that he saw as a military doctor in Calabria, he developed a sense ofmission to improve the physical and mental health of the lower class. Intime, notes the Italian historian Delia Frigessi, impelled by his political and

2011] WAS CESARE LOMBROSO ANTISEMITIC? 649

social sensitivity, he became an active figure in the Socialist party andserved a term as a member of the Torino City Council (Frigessi, 2003, 263).

Lombroso was an active person by nature who, according to hisdaughter Gina, wanted to know everything about everything. He loved to bepresent where culture was produced and disseminated, and invested greateffort in being part of the literary scene. He never missed an opportunity toexpress his opinion, even if it had no logical basis (Rondini, 2001). As willbe seen below, it is not difficult to separate his impetuous, mercurial, andextroverted nature from the form and content of his scientific articles;neither is it a problem to differentiate between his desire to distance himselffrom what his father, as a believing Jew, symbolized for him and his ownconvictions regarding the place of the people of Israel.

RACIAL SCIENCE THEORY

Lombroso, like many doctors of the period, was influenced by Darwin-ist theory and by phrenology and craniology (measurement of the brain andcranium to identify attributes of character/disposition, morality, and person-ality of the patient). Among other things, he developed a model for theidentification of bodily attributes in criminals by measuring sizes, symme-tries, and anatomical proportions. This anthropometry is an area that,despite the credit accorded to Lombroso, began its development as early asDella Porte in 1586 and Lavater in 1775 (for a review, see Jones, 1986, 82).

In the Lombrosian model, the concept of atavism is linked to an irre-versible process of the hereditary transmission of internal physical charac-teristics and the creation of populations with inferior development amongthe species, such as criminals, wild men, and apes. To protect society, Lom-broso believed that deliberate selection was appropriate, to complement andfortify natural selection (Lombroso, 1911, xv). In earlier versions, he con-sidered criminals “atavistic throwbacks” to primitive varieties in the contin-uum of the development of the species. He determined that “the criminal isnot at all a member of the race of ‘knowing’ humans, Homo sapiens, butrepresents instead a throwback to a residual form of an earlier, more primi-tive race—Homo delinquens” (Shoham, Rahav, and Addad, 1987, 72).Lombroso dealt with issues of eugenics by prescribing programs of physicaland mental hygiene.

Lombroso considered himself a progressive, scientific emissary, tend-ing to the concerns of the new status of his country, Italy. And as a scientistit was his desire to promote Italy as an equal among the European nations.He felt an obligation to an agenda of Italy’s internal affairs, wanting amongother things to propose a solution for the enormous gap dividing Aryannorthern Italy—European, progressive, and highly educated—from Semitic


southern Italy—Mediterranean, conservative, poor, distressed, andneglected (Gibson, 1998). One aim of Lombroso’s anthropology was toposition Italy among modern European nations, thereby creating boundariesaround a new Italian citizenry, or, in Horn’s terminology, “an imaginedItalian citizenry” (Horn, 2003, 33).

In Lombroso’s world, northern Italians were Europeans in everyrespect, but he tended to marginalize the southerners, who had joined theunification of Italy in 1871. The southerners were the “Other”—primitive,untamed, poor, violent, vengeful, and corrupt. According to Horn (2003,37-43), Lombroso’s preoccupation with crime represented his attempt toeliminate the “savage” from the European Enlightenment: to demarcate theboundaries between progressive Europe and the inferior third world. In thefifth edition of The Criminal Man (L’Uomo Deliquente, 1878), Lombrosostated that criminals speak like wild men living within the flourishing Euro-pean culture. Thus, as a scientist, he proposed a solution involving the iden-tification, classification, and eradication of the wild, a rational managementof social deviancy.

Not surprisingly, Lombroso provided racist ammunition for Westerndemagogues. For example, in his book Delitti Vecchi e Nuovi (1902), hesays, “Regardless of dress or habits that may camouflage the Americanblack man, he has a surfeit of contempt for the lives of others, [has] thepitilessness so characteristic of all wild men” (Lombroso, 1902, 12). Thewhite man is “most perfect,” the black, “most imperfect.” The black manrepresents “the most primitive race; he has not changed throughoutthousands of years, and he still exhibits the childish style, his smile andmovements similar to that of the apes” (quoted in Gibson, 1998, 105). Lom-broso praises Western-Northern civilization, which he defines as industrial-ized, rich, well educated, and well informed by the press (Lombroso, 1902,7). Australia is depicted as the most civilized country and a happy civiliza-tion, because of its white population and modernity. States with high ratesof immigration from “barbarian” uncivilized countries nevertheless sufferfrom violent crimes. The presence of “colored populations” in the UnitedStates is characterized by “a lower stage of civility,” which accounts for thehigh murder rates. Homicide is part of daily life in the sense that beast-likesexual impulses are as well. Lombroso takes the same attitude toward peo-ple from the south of Italy, whom he views as the remnant of barbarianhordes (Albanians and Greeks), living in an inferior moral stage (Lom-broso, 1902, 57), thirsting for revenge and perceiving this as naturalbehavior.


RACIAL SCIENCE AND RACIAL SILENCE

For the most part, modern Western criminology texts, with a few iso-lated exceptions—e.g., Adler, Mueller, and Laufer, 1991—have made littlemention of the racial implications of Lombrosian theory. There is no men-tion whatsoever of this sinister subject either in criminological or in histori-cal texts (Gibson, 1998, 114).

An attempt to understand why the texts have repeatedly ignored ormuzzled the racial ramifications of Lombrosian theory and his shamelessattitude toward Judaism is beyond the scope of this essay. I will mentionjust two possible explanations for the denial, the ignoring, or the silence: 1)the lack of English translations of a few of the original texts, and 2) crimi-nological positivism’s fear of harsh criticism of the “founding father” ofmodern criminology, with the result, to be avoided at all costs, that thebranch upon which they have been sitting could be cut out from underthem.

Criminologists consider Cesare Lobroso’s methodology to be contro-versial. Criticism of the methodology of the father of positivism, however,is only part of the story. It is true that Lombroso was guilty of positivistthinking’s basic sin: the ability to organize one’s arguments with basicinternal logic in order to explain how phenomena occur and fall into place.This is the First Commandment of positivism, as defined by AugusteComte. But surely a more serious sin, as this paper will stress, is itssubstance.

It is primarily Lombroso’s flawed methodology that seems to haveattracted most of the criticism of these literary genres throughout the years.This gives rise to a certain paradox in the body of our knowledge of crimi-nology: while we can assert that Lombroso was indeed the father of moderncriminology, could he also have been the father of criminological positiv-ism, which insists on basing itself on objective and neutral empiricism,appropriate methodology, and the creation of internal logic?

A sample of 26 textbooks and introductions to criminology examinedfrom the bookshelves of Israeli institutions of higher education reveals aninvariable duplication of content. A thorough summary of this duplication,with an expanded critical discussion of the methodological problem, can befound in Dario Melossi (2008, 49-52):

• Regarding the nature of the criminal without regard to the culturalvariable and its influences on the law enforcement system.

• A rigid reliance on causal fallacy, using only two variables (forexample, body structure as a direct factor in criminal activity).

• The lack of a control group.


• A disregard of the screening done by the law enforcement system,which tends to imprison certain populations. These are prisoners, notnecessarily representative of the criminal population.

Internal logic is rarely mentioned as the most damning shortcoming. Itwould appear that Lombroso took pains to eschew thought of any kind inorder to graft the facts onto a supposedly logical theory. Gould (1981) saysthat Lombroso constructed virtually all his arguments in a manner thatexcluded defeat, thus making them scientifically meaningless. Whenever heencountered a contrary fact, he performed some mental gymnastics to incor-porate it within his system (Gould, 126).

His “positivist method” was thus to create chaos in the course ofdeveloping the theory, or “the messiness of science-in-the-making” (Horn,2003, 5). Lombroso preferred adding to his publications, including evernewer editions, to processing, fine-tuning, and integrating. He hastened topublish as much as he could, never subjecting his various editions to revi-sion. The result was text that was uneven, confused, and full of contradic-tions and errors. Lombroso, a man of curiosity, was also impulsive anddisorganized. He had an enormous craving for knowledge, informationgathering, measurement, and the creation of categories in the naıve hopethat loading more and more material and creating more categories wouldresult in the creation of knowledge: “a considerable amount of work wasinvolved in trying to make these texts cohere, to hold everything togetherunder the umbrella of a new discipline, and to have it all count as science”(Horn, 5).

For example, the first edition of his book The Criminal Man (L’UomoDelinquente, 1876) comprised 252 pages, while the three-volume fifth edi-tion contained 1900 pages. Nothing was deleted from the earlier editions.

Criticism relating to Lombroso and the “other,” which centers on histreatment of women, also takes him to task for contradictions in internallogic (Smart, 1977, 32-34). A number of feminist scholars mention a quali-tative defect in his distorted perception of women in general and delinquentwomen in particular (see a survey in Harrowitz, 1994, chap. 2). Lombrosowas faced with a severe problem. He theorized that women turn to crimeless than men do; therefore, they must theoretically be less atavistic. On theother hand, he adopted the notion that women are inferior to men and ata-vistic by nature. If Lombroso the private individual advocated free choiceand divorce, Lombroso the researcher spoke of the utter inferiority ofwomen to men (Gibson, 2002, 82). Here there is a failure of logic. AsZedner remarks (1994, 279), if all women are atavistic by nature, it is diffi-cult to identify women who are criminals, because of the lack of externalsigns. The solution, according to Zedner, was the focus on prostitution,which Lombroso said included unfaithfulness and sexual promiscuity, the


natural expression of feminine degeneration. “Prostitution” was the magicword that can make sense of Lombroso’s theory regarding female delin-quency in general.

This contradiction and probable emotional ambivalence regardingwomen is particularly manifest in Lombroso’s family life. He married ayoung woman and then drove a wedge between her and her observance ofthe Jewish commandments. Before his marriage, he wrote to a friend thatshe was young and beautiful, but that she observed the commandments;however, he would see to it that she forgot about them quickly. Although hefavored progress, liberalism, and sexual equality, he insisted on signora DeBenedetti’s devoting herself completely to being a wife and mother. Lom-broso fell under the spell of a socialist feminist doctor, Anna Kulishov, afrequent guest in his home, who used her influence to further his daughters’academic lives. On the other hand, his daughter Gina, a doctor, submittedentirely to his guidance and backing (Melossi, 2008, 61), and served as hispersonal secretary and faithful emissary of his theories on the Americancontinent.

As noted, a review of the literature shows that only a few scholars areconversant with Lombroso’s ideas about race and their negative implica-tions for Western culture in the twentieth century. Brennan, Mednick, andVolavka (1995) alone had the perspicacity to say that his ideas provided “arational basis for European imperialism and American racial social policy”(Brennan et al., 65), but they do not elaborate. David Garland too (1997) isaware that Lombroso gained popularity in Italy thanks to the fact that thecriminal type was both consistent with deep prejudices and endorsed themiddle class in its perception of the criminality produced by urbanizationprocesses (Garland, 30).

The Jewish question that preoccupied Lombroso, particularly in one ofhis writings on antisemitism (1894) and in how his writing fanned theflames of racism, is not discussed at all in the criminology literature. Thefact that Lombroso’s book Antisemitismo e le Scienze Moderne was nottranslated into English probably explains this avoidance and silence, and itis also likely that, as mentioned earlier, it is hard for contemporary positiv-ist criminologists to tarnish the name of their “founding father” withcharges of racism or, worse, to accuse this enlightened and progressive Jew-ish doctor of Jew-hatred.

RACIAL THEORY

Some of Lombroso’s followers veered ominously in the direction ofrace theory when they attempted to identify inferiority in human races,including not only the Homo delinquens and the mentally ill but also infer-


ior races—in particular Mediterranean/Semites, the black race, and the yel-low race. There were those who suggested using selective breeding, socialhygiene, or primary prevention (the sterilization of at-risk mothers, amongother things) to deal with sub-races found in Europe. In Italy, for instance,the promoter of Mussolini’s criminal code, Enrico Ferri, praised positivismas a strong foundation for the fascist doctrine (as did Raffaele Garofalo andAlfredo Niceforo). The “scientific alibi” and its adoption by totalitarianpolitical ideologies were exploited in other countries as well (Frigessi,2003, 389). Gibson (2002) says that criminal anthropology promulgated thenotion of race as a biological given and focused attention especially onracial differences by creating a hierarchy of superiors and inferiors, thusgranting legitimacy to acts of oppression by the white regime and providingammunition for propaganda for Italy’s colonial policy in Africa (Ethiopia,Somalia, Eritrea, and later Libya).

Regarding the Italian fascist regime, Gibson (2002) states that thecooperation of criminal anthropologists with Mussolini’s regime was notentirely opportunistic, since forms of early positivism and fascism sharedideological affinities. Both promoted surveillance, classification, and disci-pline. Both wanted to equip officials in the criminal justice system withflexibility and discretion rather than binding them with the rule of law. Andboth were careless about individual rights in the name of social defense(Gibson, 2002, 202).

According to Frigessi (2003), political racism also exploited criminalanthropology in the area of crime, since Lombroso interpreted physical andmental degeneration as a sign of inborn criminality, thus justifying steriliza-tion, capital punishment, or some other form of killing (Frigessi, 382-383),or anything else that might justify forms of prevention, incapacitation, andnegative eugenics.

Historian George Mosse (1978) asserts that the Nazis in Germany andthe Fascists in Italy usually rejected Freudian theory, while they embracedLombrosian psychology, extending the claim of racial inferiority to otherpopulations, obviously including Lombroso’s own people:

Nazi euthanasia was based upon the proposition that degeneration asexemplified by habitual criminals or insanity was structural and final. Butsince the Nazis also believed the Jews to be degenerate as well as habit-ual criminals, Lombroso’s definition of criminality became a part ofHitler’s final solution of the Jewish problem (Mosse, 78).

One may say that Lombroso the Jew, the socialist, the liberal, the pro-gressive founder of the science of criminal law, he who took pains in hispolitical activities on behalf of weak populations, had an unintended, indi-


rect influence on racist thinking one generation later. The concept of degen-eration as Lombroso developed it became the intrinsic name for“criminality, a soul imprisoned in Hell” (Mosse, 83).

With passage of the racial laws (leggi razziali) in 1938, Italy’s Jewsofficially became the focus of Aryan official racism. Clearly, Mussolinireflected the tradition of racial thinking and the dictionary that criminalanthropology had constructed a few decades earlier (Gibson, 2002, 104).

Not only totalitarian regimes were enthusiastic with Lombroso’s teach-ings. His ideas were promulgated among welfare workers, educators, doc-tors, and clerics, especially after 1890 in the United States (Rafter, 1992),where ideas about eugenics, especially negative eugenics, were proposed.These ideas included sterilization of women with “defective genes” andheredity research focusing on families with a high incidence of criminalityor some other deviancy (for example, the case study of the Kallikaks; for areview, see Akers, 2000, 57-59).

In 1927, in the democratic United States of America, Earnest AlbertHooton received generous funding from Harvard University to verify Lom-broso’s theories. He sampled over 13,000 criminals and more than 3,000adult men as a control group in ten states. He measured 107 physical traits,crania, and faces, including tattoos. Hooton published his conclusions alsoin a book of popular science, Crime and Man (Hooton, 1939). He deter-mined, among other things:

We can direct and control the progress of human evolution by breedingbetter types and by the ruthless elimination of inferior types, if only weare willing to found and to practice a science of human genetics. Withsound and progressively evolving human organisms in the majority ofour species, problems of human behavior will be minimized, and therewill be improved educability. Crime can be eradicated, war can beforgotten.

Lombroso proposed the establishment of penal colonies, the isolationof inferior populations, and the prevention of the possibility to reproduce. Itis instructive to read the explicit original that encourages negative eugenics,with an explanation of those with a hopelessly inferior structure who with-out mitigation will not be worthy of reproduction (Hooton, 392).

BLOND HAIR OR A HOOKED NOSE?

Many contradictions in internal logic, together with numerous distor-tions of basic facts, also arrest one’s attention in Lombroso’s treatment ofthe Jewish question and antisemitism. In his book Anti-Semitismo e le


Scienze Moderne (1894), Lombroso manifests ambivalence toward his peo-ple: he begins by defending but ends by accusing.

In the first part of his book, there is an attempt to define the Jews as“having characteristics of the Aryan race . . . with hair lighter than that ofthe British.” This claim is based on paradoxical logic arising from adoptionof prejudices, cliches, hearsay evidence, stereotypes, and even grotesquegossip about his fellow Jews (Harrowitz, 1994, 29).

Lombroso did not identify himself as a Jew in his book. He disen-gaged, estranged himself, and spoke in terms of “they” and what “they”must do to gain an equal status and be assimilated among the nations, toemerge from their isolation and their inferiority. Among other things,“they” should forget primitive customs (something he himself did as a childand coerced his new wife into doing). In a sense, it appears that Lombrosowas settling an ongoing account, a psychological unfinished business withhis father, and he recommends that his people do what he did to his wife:they should forget tradition and conduct themselves as the Gentiles do.

His enlightened aspirations and his apologetic intentions were steepedin ignorance, particularly concerning Orthodox Jewish ritual, which heresisted from early childhood to distance himself from the religiosity of hisfather (Dolza, 1990, 30). Thus, for example, he called the eating of matzoton Passover a “stupid ritual” (“stupidi riti”), and he designated the customof laying tefillin (phylacteries) as a primitive remnant of the real OrthodoxJew (“of whom, fortunately, very few remain”—Lombroso, 1894, 14).Regarding circumcision, he said:

Why should they not rid themselves of the savage injuring that is circum-cision, of the many fetishes of their holy books . . . that they dispersethroughout their homes [referring to mezuzot] and even affix on theirbodies [phylacteries], as if they were amulets. . . . For the same reason,they should leave the liturgical use of the Hebrew language to foreigners,and become convinced that Our Father in Heaven can understand theirprayer in whatever language they speak (Lombroso, 1894, 107-108).

There is an identifiable phenomenon in Lombroso characteristic of thespirit of the time: the fear of ritual and of the Holy Tongue—Hebrew. TheHoly Tongue is a forbidden language that separates the People of Israelfrom the enlightened world. It is a language of merchants, of hidden codes,of concealment and falsehood. This belief, which included Yiddish as well,penetrated the consciousness of many enlightened Jews in Europe. It is akind of Jewish self-hatred, or the adoption of the ancient beliefs ofantisemites in Europe. For example, according to Gilman (1986): “The fearof the way the Jews interpret Scripture is easily transformed into a fear ofthe books possessed by ‘the people of the Book.’ The Jews’ books become


the embodiment of the blindness and dangerousness of the Jews” (Gilman,31); in addition, “The devious and corrupt language of the Jews reflects andis reflected by their criminal actions against the Christian world. Removethe barrier of language, and one will have reached the first level in civiliz-ing the Jew” (Gilman, 85).

As an enlightened Jew (or, better to say, as an enlightened Italian witha Jewish background), Lombroso attempted to renounce everything remi-niscent of the past. Thus, for example, he asserts that: “The ridiculous ritu-als of matzot on Passover, which run so counter to what is accepted in thecountries in which they live, arouse ludicrousness and even revulsion madeeven more intense by how important the Orthodox [Jews] consider them”(Lombroso, 1894, 14).

It is not only the Jews’ behavior and habits that Lombroso attacks, butalso their physical and mental traits. Here, Lombroso contradicts himself byattributing to the Jews traits dependent on the body and genetics, not merelyon language and customs. He further contradicts himself by identifying theJews in the beginning of the book as an Aryan people, blonder than theBritish, but at the end he transforms them into Semites, and thusreprehensible.

It is actually at this point that Lombroso proceeds from an apologeticattitude to an antisemitic attack. Thus, for example, although at the outsethe defines the Jewish race as superior to the Aryan, he perpetuatesprejudices regarding both physical and mental traits. The Jew is “weak,”physically “small,” “neurotic,” “wretched,” and “boring.” His morals arealso defective: he is “a cheat,” “a liar”; he is “lecherous” and “ambitious.”Lombroso further confuses inherited and acquired traits, primarily due toghetto life and employment. Thus, for example, body measurements andwretchedness are intermingled, and this becomes a permanent given: “TheJews’ race is not a strong one. The Jew in large Jewish centers, particularlyin the East, is usually small and fragile, his appearance ruinous andwretched” (Lombroso, 1894, 18). Lombroso turns fixed habits into heredi-tary physical traits, like tattoos among “born” criminals: “The habit [ofmaking deals] has been so intensive and has continued for so many yearsthat it has emphasized their habit of cunning and falsehood, the meagermuscular energy so prevalent among merchants” (Lombroso, 1894, 13); andthat “Jews make much use of their intellect, which gives rise to their neu-rotic characteristics” (Lombroso, 1894, 84).

Their moral inferiority is a result, among other things, of the Jews’employment. Not only do they work with their intellect, but they are alsotraders, and as such, they became “the principal moneylenders; theybrought to commerce the insatiable spirit of greed, as well as of deceit,which waxed among them from their continued practice [of trading]” (Lom-


broso, 1894, 89). From here he reaches his final conclusion: “I agree thatmost of them are immoral and covet power more than they covet good”1

(Lombroso, 1894, 100). Noteworthy are the sources of this moral inferi-ority, which are the result not only of their traditional occupation, but alsoof the nation’s difficult history:

This is one of the most stubborn races in existence; only the strong, thestubborn, the energetic could have insisted on remaining Jews; this istherefore a race of extraordinary stubbornness; but in order to hold theirown, it was necessary to cloak their stubbornness in humility and flexibil-ity, a special type of flexibility that also gives rise to moral inferiority(Lombroso, 1894, 16).

If the assertion that a number of Lombroso’s followers providedammunition for racist propaganda in Europe is true, unquestionably thesewords, even without mediation or interpretation, could also have fanned theflames of Jew-hatred. It is important to note that his book, written in Italian,was translated in the same year (1894) into German, and into French in1899.

THE ZIONIST QUESTION

The concept of degeneration that accompanies determinism and theconviction that immutable physical and character traits are ingrained hasbeen interpreted differently by different thinkers. Some see a solution infusion with other peoples or extermination (negative eugenics); others seekways to improve the race (positive eugenics); on these concepts see, forexample, Beirne and Messerschmidt (1995, 352-353).

For example, in the modern Land of Israel, the settlement movementof the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenced by Max Nordau(1965, 187-188), there was widespread Zionist discussion of questionsabout Jewish degeneration in the Diaspora, and proposals along the lines ofpositive eugenics by would-be reformers (Biale, 1992, chap. 8; Cavaglion,2004, 57-58). The emphasis in this application of the theory was to create a“Judaism with muscles” and to build the new Jew, who would grow andthrive on his land. In the 1898 Second Zionist Congress in Basel, Nordau,who had become one of the main leaders of the Zionist movement, calledZionism the political “remedy” to revive the body of the young Jew, after“the terrible desolation wreaked among us during 18 centuries of disper-

1. So that there be no doubt that these words are out of context, I will cite thispassage in the original Italian: Convengo tuttavia che la maggioranza loro non emorale, e sente piu la bramosia, l’avidita del potere che quella del bene (p. 100).


sion” that have led to an “effete Judaism” (Nordau, 1965, 117-118). Nor-dau, who became Herzl’s right-hand man, saw in the teeming ghettoes thereason for the Jews’ sickness, since they were deprived of decent physicalconditions (Nordau, 1965, 187). That being the case, it was not heredity andthe rigid determinism of biology but primarily the environment that causedthe Diaspora Jew’s degeneration. Changing the environment—in otherwords, a return to the bond with the Land of the Fathers—would serve as ablessed cure.

Nordau continued the romantic streak of the people of the Enlighten-ment by depicting the male Jew in the Diaspora as a sickly creature, need-ing physical virility and “a stable and sound marriage” and a healthy bondwith the land (Biale, 1992). He proposed a unique remedy to combat thefrailty of the Jews. National health was guaranteed not only by physicaltraining—“Judaism with muscles,” in his words—and a return to nature,but mainly by aliyah (immigration) to the Land of Israel, with the creationof complete family and community life (see also Gilman, 1985, 130). InNordau’s opinion, it was the task of Zionism as a revolutionary movementto establish in Israel a new kind of “deep-chested men, taut of limb, bold ofview,” strong young men like the legendary Bar-Kokhba (Nordau, 1965,187-188).

Notwithstanding the controversy surrounding the source of the degen-eration (usually hereditary according to Lombroso, environmental accord-ing to Nordau) and the various eugenic solutions, whether positive ornegative, it is important to point out that Lombroso, the assimilated (andantisemitic?) Jew, and Nordau, the nationalist and Zionist, shared greatmutual admiration. Each of these doctor-authors dedicated a book to hiscounterpart.

Lombroso met often with Nordau, entertained him in his home inTorino, and on a number of occasions called him “my brother in arms.” Heidentified with Nordau’s ideas, going so far as to define his thinking as “theonly true salve I have gotten from the world” (Frigessi, 2003, 315). In theViennese Jewish-Zionist newspaper Die Welt, the two doctors expressedmutual praise on several occasions (Frigessi, 320).

Despite his friendship with Nordau, at the beginning of Lombroso’scareer he considered assimilation a solution for the problem of antisemit-ism, while the option of Zionism and the establishment of a Jewish settle-ment in the Land of Israel were out of the question. He advocated deliberateabsorption and the fusion of Judaism, Christianity, and socialism—a newreligion with political involvement that would bring new tidings to modernman. This was also the message that Lombroso imparted to the members ofhis family. Regarding Western Jews, he advocated their remaining in theirnative countries and committing themselves to merging with the Christians,


moving in the direction of a modern, syncretistic religion, with no narrow-mindedness: “The perfect solution would be if Jews and Christians, oncethey rise above the ordinary prejudices would unite in a new religion; inother words, a new, socialist Christianity, in which the Jews, having freedthemselves of old and ridiculous rituals, could blend without shame or coer-cion” (Lombroso, 1894, 109).

Gibson (2002, 103) notes that the Jews of Italy became assimilatedinto the surrounding culture more quickly than their coreligionists in otherWestern European countries. They fought for the unification of Italy andwere committed patriots of the new country, which promised their emanci-pation. It is thus easy to understand why in the early years Lombrosoopposed Zionism in utterances such as the following:

One must also take into consideration that an extremely small proportionof the Jews, from Russia and Romania [Eastern Jews], will continue tofeel an attraction to these countries (Palestine–Eretz Israel–Judea), whichare not even their homeland. . . . We have seen, similarly, that from bothan anthropological and a moral point of view, and even in terms of lan-guage and dress, they [Western Jews] have blended in their homelandsand have been planted in the spirit of the land in which they live. . . .Thus, in Italy they are not merely Italians but also Venetians in [the]Veneto [region], Piedmontese in [the] Piedmont [region]. Now, howcould they possibly be transformed into patriots of Judea? And whatmanner of farmers could all these or matchmakers, jewelers, wine-makers[be], and what kind of agricultural land can the desolate wasteland ofPalestine [provide]? . . . If emigration at all, it should veer toward moremodern centers, in Australia, North America, and also South America(Lombroso, 1894, 104-106).

Lombroso’s Zionist thesis, like his theses about women, “colored peo-ple,” Southern Italians or Jews, is inconsistent. His position toward Zionismdid change with time, particularly after the Dreyfus trial, the pogroms inEastern Europe, and his meetings with Russian Zionist leaders during theCriminology Conference in Moscow (Frigessi, 2003, 323). In the revisedversion of his Zionist thesis, Lombroso still did not believe that Zionismoffered a solution for Western Jewry, which had already begun the desirableprocess of assimilation. But at the same time he said (and here again hecontradicted himself) that the Land of Israel was the “cradle of easternEuropean Jewry” (Frigessi, 324), and on at least one occasion he said, “Ibelieve in the renascence of the Jewish nation and in what could occur onthe land on which the light spread to all the world” (quoted in Frigessi,326). At the end of his life, Lambroso favored the possibility of Jewishsettlement in the Land of Israel, although he refused to play an active part inthe movement, for reasons of age.


DISCUSSION

This essay contradicts a long-standing criminological tradition thatconsiders methodology and internal logic the primary deficiencies of thefather of criminology. An analysis of texts in the original, to which English-speaking scientists—in particular criminologists, who have dominated aca-demic discourse since the 1930—did not have access, sheds new light onvery objectionable content in Lombroso’s arguments.

A study of Lombroso’s case constitutes a further example of anenlightened, assimilated Jew who adopts distorted exercises in logic toalienate himself at all costs from his roots and his people by means of sup-posedly scientific justifications.

Rafter and Gibson say (in Lombroso and Ferrero, 2004, 6) that inrecent years scholars have been more cognizant of the intellectual and polit-ical context in which Lombroso operated. His internal contradictions reflectnot only his personality, but also the Zeitgeist and the scientific knowledgeavailable in the nineteenth century, and the attitude of assimilated Jews totheir people.

As previously noted, Lombroso grew up at a time of political and intel-lectual upheaval, of the emancipation of the Jews, and in a period of yearn-ing for the revival, unification, and independence of a divided Italy(Lombroso and Ferrero, 2004, 15). The issue, however, is not only time butalso place. Turin, Lombroso’s adopted city, was the catalyst of this unifica-tion. It was first capital of the Savoy reign and Italy, and also the city thatwas the most open to European secular culture in that era. At this time,Italy, as symbolized by its first capital, “went from being one of the mostbackward countries in Europe, with its Jews confined to ghettoes until1870, to one of the most enlightened, in which Jews were able to aspire tothe highest levels of society” (Stille, 2005, 22). To cite Cecil Roth (1946,504):

. . . the impact of emancipation upon the internal life of Italian Jewry wasimmediate; in most respects, it was deleterious. It had withstood,cramped but unshaken the onslaught of the long generations of oppres-sion; but as elsewhere, it proved unable to resist the insidious blandish-ment of the new world of opportunity and equality. Within a generationof the great edict of Carlo Alberto, assimilation had made appalling pro-gress. Synagogues that were formerly open for service twice a day nowhad difficulty in assembling the necessary quorum once a week; and mostof those who attended were graybeards, whose sons considered suchthings to savor of separatism and superstition.


During the Risorgimento, Jews were highly involved in the politicalrevival; many died as patriots. In Italy, the struggle for the creation of aunited modern state and the struggle for emancipation of Italian Jews werevirtually synonymous (Stille, 2005, 25). As Molinari stressed (1991, 26):

This was the necessary premise to understanding the route taken by theItalian Jews in the united State of Italy: their national integrationprompted them to cross the threshold of assimilation . . . and see theirpresence in the life of the country as proof that Judaism had a universalmessage.

Whereas before the unification of Italy identification with the Jewishcommunity in all its complexity prevailed, Italian heritage graduallysuperceded ethnic ties. Italian Jews were Italian with a Mosaic faith/belief/background (Molinari, 32). They felt, for a variety of reasons, that theywere the “most respected Jews in the world” (Milano, 1963, 370). Even atits inception, the advent of fascism did not lead to any deterioration in theposition of Italian Jewry. On the contrary, twelve years after the March onRome (1934), relations between Jews and Gentiles in Italy were more har-monious that ever before (Michaelis, 1978, 6). During this period, beforethe 1938 Leggi Razziali—the commitment to the Italian nation—causedmany Jews to reject Judaism, “as if being a Jew meant not being completelyItalian” (De Felice, 1961, 15), considering that identifying with traditionmeant being contaminated by the diseases of the ghetto (Milano, 1963,372). The same attitude helps explain anti-Zionism among Italian Jews. It isno accident that no Italian representative took part in the first Zionist Con-gress in 1897. Identifying with a new national movement meant betrayingany form of being Italian.

After the unification, three Jews were elected to the first Italian parlia-ment in 1861. In 1874, there were eleven Jewish deputies and in 1894, theirnumber reached fifteen—the highest level in Italian history (Stille, 2005,25).

This process highlights the perceived difference between the Jews ofthe past, with “their stupid rites,” and the opportunity to climb the socialladder. The fathers, like Cesare’s father, were seen as forced to live a life offear and harassment; they remained enclosed in their inner ghetto of bigotryand superstition. The new generation, in particular in Turin, became “civi-lized,” more attuned and open to modernity, progress, science, nationalism,and socialism (A. Cavaglion, 2009). This mounting drive for emancipationand civil rights helps account for Lombroso’s fear of Jewish degenerationand his excoriation of tradition, which he depicted as representing physical,


mental, and moral evils. More generally, it may clarify his professionalambitions and his calls for assimilation.

*Gabriel Cavaglion is a senior lecturer in the School of Social Work and Depart-ment of Criminology, Ashkelon Academic College, Ashkelon, Israel.

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Jews in Afghan Eyes

Mark Silinsky*

Neither Israel nor world Jewry looms large in Afghanistan or theAfghan mind. Afghan and Israeli soldiers do not face each other as enemiesor allies on any battlefield, and there are no ancient feuds or prominentcurrent grievances that grate. Commercial activity is very limited, and eth-nic connections are very thin. There are some Afghan emigrants in TelAviv, remnants of the Jewish-Afghan diaspora of the late 20th century. Butthere are no Jews left in Afghanistan. Several empty, usually dilapidatedsynagogues and gravestones are the last markers of a 2,700-year Jewishcivilization that never shone warmly, never brightly, in Afghanistan. Butunlike some countries in which there are few or almost no Jews, Afghans,by and large, have no argument with Jews or Israel. Afghan politicians,opinion makers, and clerics do not express the type or level of hate andanger found in some neighboring states. They don’t seem to care muchabout Jewish or Israeli issues.

Why, then, is there such passionate hatred in two of Afghanistan’sneighbors, Iran and Pakistan, when Afghans have little interest in Israel orJews? In neither of these states is there a sizable Jewish community. But,unlike Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan are consumed by Israel and worldJewry. Few countries, perhaps no country since the defeat of Hitler’s Ger-many, has so passionately, ostentatiously, and repeatedly threatened toexterminate Jews as has Iran. Teheran is nakedly ambitious about its intentto build a nuclear arsenal to, in its words, “wipe Israel off the map.” Paki-stan, too, attacks Israel, if only rhetorically. As in Iran, Pakistani politicaland religious leaders, opinion makers, university students, and firebrandspreach unadulterated contempt for Israel and Jews. Afghan leadership andits non-insurgent population, however, are generally quiet on issues sur-rounding Israel. There is no easy explanation for this.

667


ISRAEL AND JEWS THROUGH AN IRANIAN PRISM

Jews have a storied, mercurial, and biblically celebrated civilization inPersia/Iran. Some Iranian Jews living in Tel Aviv and Los Angeles speakwith warm nostalgia of the Jewish Golden Age during the rule of the shah, arelatively secular leader, so hated by the theocrats in control of Teherantoday. But there are only an estimated 25,000-30,000 Jews living amongIran’s Muslims, and these Jews live in fear of their lives.

Jews remaining in Iran are officially allowed to leave, but many obsta-cles prevent their exit.1 There are still synagogues and Jewish schools in thecapital,2 and some Western commentators underscore what they see as thesteady harmony in which many Iranians and their Jewish countrymen live.For example, Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote in 2009, “PerhapsI have a bias toward facts over words, but I say the reality of Iranian civilitytoward Jews tells us more about Iran—its sophistication and culture—thanall the inflammatory rhetoric.”3 Other observers are not as sanguine anddescribe the Jewish community as one of hostages and Western journalistswho downplay the always-present threat to Iranian Jews as naive orcollaborative.

What is not open to speculation is the abiding hatred toward interna-tional Jewry as expressed in Holocaust denial and vast conspiracy theories,as well as the repeated threats to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. Atomicbombs are to be tools to create, in Iranian president MamoudAhmadinejad’s words, “a world without Zionism.” If the Muslim world istoday free of large Jewish communities, Ahmadinejad’s future world wouldbe rid of the only Jewish state.

On the popular-culture front, Iran sponsored an international Holo-caust-denial cartoon carnival in response to the now-famous Danish cartooncontest that depicted Mohammad in a sarcastic light.4 Appealing to a senseof humor perhaps not widely shared outside of Teheran, the quasi-porno-graphic cartoon (figure 1) lampooning an improbable sexual tryst betweenAnne Frank and Adolf Hitler won first prize. This is an accurate representa-tion and not an aberration of the official Iranian views on Jews and Israel.

1. Shelomo Alfasa, “What of the Jews of Iran?,” The Jerusalem Post, April 25,2009.

2. “I Was Scared in Iran as a Jew,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 26, 2007.3. Roger Cohen, “What Iran’s Jews Say,” Globalist, International Herald

Tribune, February 23, 2009.4. Sharon Ashley, “From the Editor,” The Jerusalem Report, March 6, 2006.

2011] JEWS IN AFGHAN EYES 669

Figure 1: Humor of the MullahsWinner of Iran’s Cartoon Contest of 20065

This hatred in Iran is vast and consuming. According to a 2006 ZogbyInternational poll on behalf of Reader’s Digest, 67% agreed that the state ofIsrael is “illegitimate and should not exist,” and 9% disagreed.6 In a pollconducted in May 2009 by KA Europe SPRL, a privately owned researchcompany, the most frequently cited threat to Iran’s security was Israel.Forty-four percent of Iranians polled ranked Israel as the highest threat totheir country’s security. The United States was given 38 percent.7

But Iran’s hatred extends well beyond snickering antisemitism. Tehe-ran boasts a missile capability of reaching Israel, which is the Shihad-3missile, and displayed a mockup of the 85-ton Simorgh, which can hit Israeland parts of the United States, according to the former director of Israel’sBallistic Missile Defense Organization.8

ISRAEL AND JEWS THROUGH THE PAKISTANI PRISM

As with Iran, Pakistan is contiguous to Afghanistan. It has a long bor-der that flanks Afghanistan’s south and east. The borders themselves wereborn of controversy and boundary disputes that still bedevil relations.

5. http://www.hyscience.com/archives/2006/02/dutch_islamists.php or http://www.tomgrossmedia.com/MohammedCartoons.html.

6. Jim Lobe, “Iran: Poll Suggests Strong Nationalism, Anti-US Sentiment,”Inter Press Service English News Wire, July 14, 2006.

7. Alan Fram, “Poll: Few Iranians Have Favorable Opinion of US,” Charles-ton Daily Mail, June 9, 2009.

8. Aron Ben David, “Nuclear Boost,” Aviation Week & Space Technology 172(February 15, 2010): 33-34.


Unlike in the dominant Farsi-speaking population in Iran, Pakistan’s ethnic-ity is often indistinguishable from most Afghans’, who are largely Pashtun.

Pakistan was born of British India, at about the same time Israel wonits independence. If Israel was created as a haven for Jews in a hostile, post-Holocaust world, Pakistan came to statehood with Islam as its raisond’Etat. Both states were relatively small compared to their neighbors, whichthey saw as existential threats. India, adjacent to East and West Pakistan,was always seen as the main enemy, and Israel was and is surrounded byenemies. Beyond this, Pakistan and Israel had little in common. Israel hadno Pakistanis and Pakistan had no Jews.

Many Pakistanis hate Israel and Jews, though it is not likely that manyhave ever met a Jew. According to a summer 2005 Pew Memorial Researchpublic opinion poll on three religions—Christianity, Islam, and Judaism—only 5% of Pakistanis have a positive opinion of Jews, while 74% havenegative views.9 This same poll also revealed that of the majority of thosepolled, 51% saw Judaism as the most violent of the three religions. Thosewho thought that Islam was the most violent were 4% of the polled; Christi-anity also took 4%.

As in Iran, the current fever-pitch-level hatred of Jews and Israel grewin the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Radicalization began from a num-ber of factors, not least of which was the large subsidy of Pakistani madras-sas (religious schools) under the patronage of Saudi Arabia and other oil-wealthy Gulf benefactors.

As in all countries, leaders help to shape public opinion. The highlyrespected former head of Pakistani intelligence, General Hamid Gul,declared openly on al Jazeera that “Israel is our main enemy. It is eitherthem or us.”10 In June 2010, Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the former leader of themajor Pakistani religious-political party Jamaat-e-Islami, agreed: “Israel isan illegitimate state . . . Muslims neither have accepted Israel, nor will theyever do so.”11 This Manichaean view is shared by many Pakistani intellec-tuals, who also despise Christians and Hindus.

Elaborate conspiracy theories are common in many parts of the Islamicworld, and they flourish in Pakistan. Sometimes, Pakistan’s religious lead-ers portray Israel and world Jewry as intractable malefactors in Pakistan’saffairs. India, Israel, and often America are rhetorically melded into anabstract enemy. There are many examples of this conspiratorial prism.

9. “Islamic Extremism: Common Concern for Muslim and Western Publics,”Pew Research Center, July 14, 2005, http://pewglobal.org.

10. General Hamud Gul, “Israel Is Our Main Enemy. It Is Either Us or Them,”Al-JazeeraTV (Qatar), August 8, 2006.

11. Roznama Express, Pakistan, June 3, 2010.


Some of theories are built on vast collusions involving the intelligence andsecurity services from India, the United States, and Israel. A leading Pakis-tani television personality, Zaid Hamid, claims that these countries use theBlackwater security firm to destroy Pakistan.12 When the Twin Towerswere attacked, many Pakistanis blamed Israel and world Jewry.13

Pakistani public figures speak often and loudly about meting out pun-ishment against Israel and other enemies. It is difficult for Westerners tofollow the logic of some of the theories and proposed punishments. Forexample, Majeed Nizami, owner of the Roznama Nawa-i-Waqt media groupand a leading figure in journalism, said, “We should unite to combat theexcesses by Jews and Christians. We cannot teach a lesson to Israel or toIndia without Jihad. Jihad is the only way to fight injustice at the interna-tional level.”14

Maulana Chinioti, a prominent Pakistani cleric from the internationalKhatm-e-Nabuwat movement, appealed to the world’s Muslims to boycottall products marketed or made by Jewish-owned companies. He said thatJews regularly and deviously conspire to smear the image of Islam. “Iappeal to all the Muslims to stop buying products made by Jews. They earnfrom us and spend the money on heretic activities against our religion.”15

Figure 2: Israel Harming Palestine—A Common Theme in the Pakistani Media16

12. Sabrina Tavernese, “Talk of Conspiracies Drives Political Dialogue in Paki-stan,” Honolulu Star-Bulletin, May 26, 2010.

13. Mark McDonald, “Pakistanis Believe Israel Is Behind Attacks on America,”Knight/Ridder Tribune Business News, September 22, 2001.

14. Roznama Nawa-i-Waqt, Pakistan, June 3, 2010.15. Roznama Islam, Pakistan, May 27, 2010.16. The News, Pakistan, June 2, 2010.


Some prominent Pakistani intellectuals are convinced that many inter-national organizations—the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund,international charities—are infected with un-Islamic, particularly Jewish,contaminants. For example, Mian Mehboob Ahmed, retired chief justice ofPakistan’s Shari’a Court, said: “Muslim countries should quit the UnitedNations Organization (UNO) and strengthen the Organization of IslamicCountries (OIC) [sic] to contest the conspiracies by the Jews and the Chris-tians.” Given the block voting power of Muslim states and the constantcondemnations of Israel that emanate from their halls in the UN, it is notclear why any Muslim state would leave that international body. But, asAhmed explained, the UN is “an extension of the power of Jews and noth-ing else.”17

AFGHANISTAN, ISRAEL, AND JEWS

In contrast to Iran and Pakistan, there is a much lower level of hatredin Afghanistan for Jews and Israel, as judged by popular, religious, journal-istic, and political rhetoric. The Jews of Afghanistan had an ancient, if smalland now extinct, civilization in Afghanistan. According to still-existingAfghan lore, today’s Afghans are related to the lost tribes of Israel; morespecifically, some of the Afghan ethnicities see themselves as beingdescended from some of the lost tribes of Israel. Partly legend, partly docu-mented history, the Jews of Afghanistan traced their roots to the Assyrianand Babylonian empires of 720 BCE and 560 BCE.

By the middle of the 20th century, there were fewer than 5,000 Jews inAfghanistan, and most of these immigrated to Israel in the 1950s and 1960s.By the early 1970s, only several hundred Jews remained, most of whom leftfor Israel and the United States after the Soviet invasion of 1979. By thetime the Taliban consolidated its power, in 1996, only ten Jews remained inAfghanistan. Almost all lived in Kabul, where there were not enough maleadult Jews to hold a Sabbath prayer service.

Life was miserable for most Afghans under the Taliban, who enforcedmany totalitarian elements similar to those in Stalin’s Soviet Union.Afghans were encouraged to report on their neighbors’ behavior; political,artistic, and intellectual activities were heavily monitored by state authori-ties. The Taliban’s Caligula-like sadism shocked much of the world, butthere is no evidence that the handful of remaining Jews lived under worseconditions than did the small Hindu community. In fact, the Hindus mayhave received more contempt and scorn from the Taliban than did the Jews,who had some nominal protection in being considered people of the book.

17. Roznama Nawa-i-Waqt, Pakistan, June 3, 2010.


Figure 3: Zablon Simintov—The Last Jew of Afghanistan

The Taliban were driven from Afghanistan in late 2001, if only tempo-rarily. If life can imitate humor, the story of the desert-island Jew fits intothe Afghan drama. On their march across the Pacific in 1944, U.S. sailorscame across a lone Jewish castaway who had spent 20 years on a forgottenPacific atoll. When a sailor asked him why he built two synagogues whenhe was the only person on the island, he said, “This one I pray in, and thisone I won’t step foot in.” This old yarn captured the spirit of the only tworemaining Jews in post-Taliban Afghanistan, Zablon Simintov and IshaqLevin, who loathed each other and were loud about it.

Simintov, known to his neighbors by the moniker “the Jew,” becamethe only Jew in Afghanistan after Levin died in 2005. The long-standingfeud between the two became a scrap of humor in a land about which therewas little to joke. Each had accused the other of crimes that included theft,espionage, and attempted murder. Not least of the spats had to do withpossession of the one remaining torah in Afghanistan.18 But the rivalry diedwith Levin; when Simintov died, he took to his grave the last spark of Jew-ish Afghanistan, which had had endured for 2,700 years.

The memories aren’t all bad. There remains some warm nostalgia inpockets of the Jewish-Afghan diaspora; some Jews remember periods ofcalm and warm relations with their Muslim neighbors. During the Taliban,many Muslims, who earlier were friendly with the few remaining Jews,became reluctant to be seen socializing with non-Muslims. Under theTaliban, fear was widespread and victimized all but the most observant and

18. Judy Mandelbaum, “Would Afghanistan’s Last Jew Please Turn Out theLights?,” Salon Magazine, May 10, 2010, salon.com.


conformist Sunni Muslims. In 2001, one middle-aged emigre said: “I havemixed emotions about the apparently upcoming attack [the impending U.S.attack against the Taliban]. On the one hand, like many Afghani expatriates,I have sympathy for those Afghani Muslims with whom I was friendly.”19

GENERAL CALM AND OCCASIONAL ANGER

There are far fewer regular and visceral anti-Israel and antisemitic pro-tests in Afghanistan. Polls, which are generally respected and conducted bycredible sources, reflect a disinterest in Israel or Jews. But there are criti-cisms, such as occasional diplomatic notes of protest against Israel militaryactions. For example, in December 2008, the Afghan Foreign Ministry con-demned Israel’s retaliation against Palestinian terrorist attacks. In thisdemarche, the Afghan government demanded that both parties cease hostili-ties.20 There are also periodic student and popular protests—most small andtransitory—over controversial, exaggerated, or fabricated charges. In thespring of 2010, students in Mazar el Sharif protested against Jews andChristians for proselytizing in Afghanistan;21in fact, there is no evidencethat either Jews or Christians were trying to convert Afghans.

These protests differ from many in Iran and Pakistan in that they areinfrequent, have limited conspiracy elements, and are often tied to specificinternational events. Protests in which Jews or Israel are referred to as acancer or a parasite, commonly made in Iran and Pakistan, are much rarer inAfghanistan. The most recent object of protest was the Israeli response tothe Gaza-bound flotilla. When incident passed, so did the protests—whichthemselves were limited.

Results from different pollsters over many years confirm that Israeland Jews are not large issues in Afghanistan.22 Polls do not list Israel as apriority, a danger, or a source of violence or instability, as they do in Iranand Pakistan. It could be that those polled were not given the option ofselecting Israel, but they had the option of placing Israel in the category ofsomething else, which took 0%.

The three polls shown below indicate that Afghans do not focus onexternal issues and do not see Israel or Jews as players in their country’s

19. “Jews in Afghanistan under the Taliban,” IsraelNationalNews.com, Septem-ber 25, 2001.

20. “Afghanistan Condemns Israel’s Air Strikes on Gaza,” Xinhua NewsAgency, December 28, 2008.

21. Wazpanra Weesa, Afghanistan, June 9, 2010.22. It is necessary to so assess Afghan opinion, because pollsters have not asked

directly about positive or negative feelings toward Israel and Jews.


affairs. The poll results in figure 4 demonstrate that Afghan priorities focuson stabilizing the country and bettering the lives of the people. Figure 5does not list Israel or Jews as dangers to Afghanistan.

Which one of the following in youropinion should be the single mostimportant priority for our country?Which is second most important? First Second ThirdCreating jobs and economic

31 18 49opportunitiesImproving roads, water, and electricity

14 32 45supplySecurity from crime and violence 40 5 45Establishing a stable national

5 19 24governmentRebuilding the schools 6 15 21Improving medical care 1 6 7Getting U.S. troops out of Afghanistan 2 4 6

Figure 4: What Should the National Priorities Be? October 2005

Which of the following do you thinkposes the biggest danger in our country? First Second TotalTaliban 58 11 69Drug traffickers 13 21 34Local commanders 7 10 17United States 8 15 23Current Afghan government 1 4 5Suicide attacks 4 4 8Neighboring countries 1 1 2Criminals 1 2 3Corruption in the government 2 4 6Poppy cultivation 1 2 3Al-Qaeda * 1 1High prices/Lack of jobs * *Bombardment from foreign forces * * 1Lack of security 1 * 1Drought * * *Illiteracy * 0 *Something else 0 * *No opinion 3 25 28

Figure 5: What Are the Greatest Dangers to Afghanistan? January 2009


A 2010 poll does not name Israel or Jews as a cause of the violence inAfghanistan.23 Non-Afghan forces—Al Qaeda/foreign jihadis, U.S. forces,the U.S. government and NATO forces—take 76% of the blame. But Israelis not included, and could not have placed any higher than 3% if it wereplaced in the “other” category.

Whom do you blame the most for theviolence that is occurring in thecountry? 2010 2009 2007

% % %Taliban 42 27 36Al Qaeda/Foreign jihadis 24 22 22U.S./American forces 5 12 9Obama/Bush/U.S. government/America 2 6 7Local commanders/warlords 7 6 6Drug traffickers 6 5 6Afghan government/Karzai 6 12 5Afghan forces 1 3 2NATO/ISAF forces 3 3 3Other 3 3 -No opinion 1 1 2

Figure 6: Whom Do Afghans Blame Most for Their Problems?24

DIPLOMATIC AND MILITARY TIES

Despite perennial rumors of Afghanistan’s pending recognition ofIsrael, it is not likely that that diplomatic relations will be formalized soon.There are several reasons for this: the current government in Kabul is sensi-tive to international and local opinion on important Islamic topics; therecent negative press coming from the Turkish flotilla; and the attacks onterrorist bases in Gaza years before has stirred Muslim anti-Israel hate.These and other sources of resurgent anti-Israel sentiment will make it diffi-cult for Kabul to break from the ranks of Muslim countries.

Another reason Kabul is hesitant to appear to close to Jerusalem isbecause Teheran, which already gives significant aid to insurgents, willbecome even more alienated. Teheran is developing nuclear weapons,expanding its regional influence, and supporting Farsi-speaking insurgentbands.

23. “Afghans More Optimistic for Future, Survey Shows,” http://abcnews.go.com/images/PollingUnit/1083alAfghanistan2009.pdf.

24. The survey was conducted for ABC News, the BBC, and ARD by theAfghan Center for Socio-Economic and Opinion Research, December 2009.


But Israel’s military technology has a place in Afghanistan, if only inits atmosphere. Israeli military engineering soars in the skies over insurgentareas, helping to locate enemy forces. The Israeli Heron drone is used byseveral Coalition Force armies in Afghanistan.25 This aircraft serves as theeyes of the counterinsurgent forces. The much smaller, Israeli-madepilotless Skylark is a pocket-size intelligence-gathering aircraft, which isalso in use in Afghanistan.26 Israel, with its high technology, could play astronger role in Afghanistan’s agricultural and military development.

LESS LIKELY REASONS FOR TOLERANCE

There are no clear reasons that the level of hatred toward Israel andJews seems so much lower in Afghanistan than it does in Iran or Pakistan.There are several hypotheses that are probably not likely:

• Israel is distant, and there are no Jews in Afghanistan. There aresimply no Jews to hate. If geographic distance from Israel and thelow number of resident Jews explain Afghan disinterest, Iran andPakistan could be expected to show similar low levels; they are veryfar from Tel Aviv. In addition, antisemitism and anti-Zionism havelong existed in countries largely void of Jews. In 1933, Germany hadno more than a 2% Jewish population, and anti-Zionism flourishes ina contemporary Europe in which few countries have more than smallpockets of Jewish communities. So, the presence or lack of presenceof Jews does not and historically has not been a valuable indicator inunderstanding antisemitism or anti-Zionism.

• Afghans are too occupied with their own concerns, particularly lowliving standards and security concerns, to focus on external targets.Afghans have burdens associated with insurgent violence, but life inPakistan and Iran is often brutish and miserable. The teeming pov-erty, poor schooling, lack of gainful employment, and generalizedfatalism does not prevent Iranians and Pakistan from blaming Jewsfor many of their problems. But Afghans do not make this argument.

• Israel and world Jewry are scapegoated by clerics and politicalleaders in Pakistan and Iran to draw attention away from their fail-ing social policies and continuing low standards of living. But ifIranians and Pakistanis scapegoat Israel and Jews to divert attentionfrom domestic failures, why wouldn’t Afghan leaders do the same?

25. “Israel Drones to Be Used by Germany in Afghanistan,” AP Online, Octo-ber 28, 2009.

26. “Elbit Systems: Israeli-Made Drones in Action in Iraq, Afghanistan,”Haaretz, March 20, 2007, http://www.haaretz.com/.


Afghanistan is wracked by insurgency, political instability, and cor-ruption. Why not blame Israel, as well?

• Pashtuns see themselves as tied to the Jewish tribes. There are someelements of ethnic solidarity between the dominant Pashtun tribe andthe Jews, but this is not likely. Pakistan is heavily Pashtun, and manyof its citizens embrace wild, antisemitic conspiracy theories. SomePashtuns believe they are descended from the lost tribes of Israel,and some anthropologists agree. But, Pashtun racial connections toIsraelis or Jews are not common themes in Afghan popularliterature.27

MORE LIKELY REASONS FOR TOLERANCE

There are several reasons that likely explain, if only partially, Afghani-stan’s lack of interest in Israel or Jews:

• Isolation from antisemitism. Afghanistan has been more isolatedfrom trends of antisemitism. Antisemitism has ebbed and flowed inIran. The Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the salvation of thePersia’s Jewish community in biblical times. In the 20th century,many, but not all, Iranian intellectuals were partial to Hitler. Fromthe late 20th century, Saudi-funded madrassas in Pakistan indoctri-nated scores of students with anti-Christian and antisemitic ideas.Afghanistan, in many ways in this sense, is more part of CentralAsia, and this area of the world has relatively low historic levels ofantisemitism.

• Non-hostile leaders in Kabul. Leaders in Afghanistan depend uponinternational aid and NATO funding, and these donors would bevery reluctant to support hate speech. Western powers simply do notwant to associate themselves with the blood libel, Protocols of theElders of Zion, and the other grandiose and chuckleheaded conspir-acy theories common in parts of the Islamic world. As it is, manyNATO partners are leaving the Coalition Force and associating withthe Karzai regime with hate speech might accelerate the exodus.

• Education. The current and constantly evolving Afghan educationalsystem, primitive as it is by Western standards, is inclined to down-play hatred and focus on tolerant elements of Islam, secular subjects,or nation-building issues. Texts and schools, which are funded byinternational donors, are monitored.

27. “Link between Israel’s Lost Tribes and Pashtuns of Af-Pak to Be Geneti-cally Analyzed,” The Hindustani Times, January 22, 2010.


• Ideological distancing from al Qaeda and Taliban. Neither al Qaedanor the Taliban are popular in Afghanistan. Most of the influencethey exert comes from fear. Much of the hatred they espouse is notshared by other Afghans, and Afghans do not seem inclined to takeup many of their hate-based causes.

• Israel and the United States are often cast together in Islamic dra-mas. Pakistanis, Iranians, Afghans, and many others in the Islamicworld see Israel and the United States as partners in world affairs.Muslims who distrust and dislike the United States share similarfeelings about Israel. Many Pakistanis and Iranians hate the UnitedStates,28 but Afghans are more positive. Afghans were very pro-American in an April 2007 poll, and most are still very pro-Ameri-can.29 There could be a connection between the relatively positivefeelings toward the United States and the apparently low level ofhatred of Jews.

AFGHAN-ISRAELI RELATIONS AND THE FUTURE

Afghan-Israeli relations may change for either better or worse; the caseof Turkey illustrates how things can turn for the worse. For years, Turkeywas one NATO’s most loyal allies, a model of progressive Islam, and apractitioner of sustainable human development. A generation ago, fewcould have predicted the Turkish hatred of Israel that haunts relations today.Well through the 1990s, Israeli-Turkish relations were solid and warm;Jerusalem and Ankara shared common concerns about subversion comingfrom Syria, Iran, and Iraq.30 But new leadership in Turkey froze these warmrelations.

It does not have to happen this way in Afghanistan, however, and ithas not happened that way with Caucasian and Central Asian states of theformer Soviet Union, particularly Azerbaijan. Jerusalem enjoys warm andprofitable relations with Azerbaijan, which is Israel’s largest supplier of

28. “Muslim Public Opinion on US Policy, Attacks on Civilians and al-Qaeda,”World Public Opinion Organization, April 24, 2007, http://www.worldpublicopin-ion.org./.

29. “Afghan Public Overwhelmingly Rejects al-Qaeda, Taliban,” World PublicOpinion poll, January 30, 2006. Eighty-one percent said that they have a favorableview of the United States (40% very favorable), with just 16% giving an unfavora-ble rating. In the war zone, one in four (26%) had an unfavorable view of theUnited States, but 73% were favorable.

30. Barry Rubin, “Israel and Turkey Share Interests,” Jerusalem Post, Decem-ber 9, 1997.


oil.31 Israel also enjoys cordial relations with the key Central Asian coun-tries Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan has boasted relatively higheconomic growth rates and has availed itself of Israeli technology to buildits agricultural and communications sectors.32 In Kazakhstan, Israeli tele-communications, mineral extraction, and construction companies havepartnered with domestic companies.33

Israel began as an agricultural state and became a “start-up,” high-technology nation within two generations. Afghanistan is not likely to havethe level of human capital or the educationally driven cultural base to makethis transition to the highest levels of the industrial information spectrum—but it can enjoy sustained human development if it can beat back the insur-gency. Israeli expertise can help Afghanistan improve livestock, designmodern farms, and boost nutrition.34

Israel stands to gain much from a robust economic relationship withAfghanistan, if reports of a yet-to-be-tapped, extractive mineral treasuretrove in Afghanistan are true. In June 2010, scientists at the U.S. GeologicalSurvey determined that there are minerals valued at over $1 trillion inAfghanistan. These minerals include gold, copper, and lithium, critical toIsrael’s high-technology sector.35 In addition, Afghanistan includes Israel inwhere it exports its world-acclaimed textiles.36

It could be that poisoned opinions will begin to flourish in Afghanistanas they now do in Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey. But this is not predetermined,and hate does not have to fester. For many centuries, the Muslims ofAfghanistan lived warmly and respectfully with their Jewish neighbors; inAfghan eyes, Jews were of a different, but not hostile, tribe. Afghanistancould follow the models of its northern Central Asian neighbors. The conta-gion of hate that flourishes in Iran and Pakistan may not flow toAfghanistan.

31. “Israel, Azerbaijan Enjoy Excellent Relations,” Panarmenian.net, February16, 2010.

32. “Central Asia Should Be a Priority from the Point of View of Israel ForeignPolicy,” UzReport, April 30, 2009.

33. Galym Orazbakov, “Kazakhstan and Israel: Good Friends and Reliable Part-ners,” Jerusalem Post, May 20, 2009.

34. “Central Asia Should Be a Priority,” April 30, 2009.35. Rahim Faiez, “Huge Mineral Discovery Could Alter Afghan War,” Associ-

ated Press, June 15, 2010.36. “Central Asia Should Be a Priority,” April 30, 2009.


*Mark Silinsky is a 26-year veteran of the defense intelligence community. He hasserved as a senior analyst in U.S. Army intelligence; as a Russian-language Armycivilian foreign area officer for Eurasia; as an Africa analyst for the Defense Intelli-gence Agency; as a J5 action officer for the Joint Staff; and as a research fellow atthe National Defense Intelligence College, as part of the Exceptional Analyst Pro-gram. Silinsky, who holds an undergraduate degree from the University of South-ern California, a MPhil from Oxford University, and an MS from TulaneUniversity, is currently completing his doctoral studies at Tulane. He graduatedfrom the Naval War College, intermediate level, and the National Defense Univer-sity, senior level, where he earned the prize for the outstanding research paper. Heis also a 2008 graduate of the Afghanistan Counterinsurgency Academy, locatednear Kabul.

“Saint” Chesterton

Simon Mayers*

In the early 1970s, David Lodge stated that following Vatican II, “theChesterbelloc brand of Catholicism,” which he characterized as “triumphal-ist, proselytizing, and theologically conservative,” is no longer “congenialto the mood of the Church.”1 This mood may be changing. A recent addressby the Vatican prefect in charge of The Congregation for the Evangelizationof Peoples announced that “the world today needs Christian apologists, notapologisers.” The address named Chesterton and Belloc as worthy exam-ples who “brilliantly expose the beauty of the Christian faith without blush-ing or compromise.”2

In the past ten years there has been a resurgence in Chesterton’s popu-larity. This renewed interest has been marked by a recent flurry of booksexamining Chesterton’s life, literature, theology, “prophetic insight,” and“holiness.”3 Sensing this change in mood, a small following of Chesterton’s

1. David Lodge, The Novelist at the Crossroads (London: Routledge & KeganPaul, 1971), 145.

2. “Address of his Eminence Cardinal Ivan Dias, Prefect of the Congregationfor the Evangelization of Peoples, on the Occasion of the Anglican Conference ofLambeth,” July 22, 2008: http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cevang/documents/rc_con_cevang_doc_20080722_dias-lambeth_en.html(downloaded July 9, 2011).

3. The following are just some examples: Dale Ahlquist’s G. K. Chesterton:The Apostle of Common Sense (2003), Aidan Mackey’s G. K. Chesterton: AProphet for the 21st Century (2009), Aidan Nichol’s G. K. Chesterton, Theologian(2009), William Oddie’s Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy (2008), Wil-liam Oddie’s The Holiness of G. K. Chesterton (2010), and Ian Ker’s G. K. Ches-terton: A Biography (2011).

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most fervent admirers have raised the question of his beatification.4 A con-ference at Oxford to discuss the holiness of Chesterton proceeded in July2009. Prayer cards with a prayer for the intercession of Chesterton havebeen created in multiple languages. These were distributed and wellreceived at a one-day symposium at Beaconsfield in October 2010. Themain focus of the symposium was Chesterton and Cardinal Newman. New-man was recently beatified by the pope, and one purpose of the symposiumwas to suggest that Chesterton was the natural successor of the cardinal. Anumber of apologetics have been formulated by Chesterton’s admirers con-cerning his discourse about Jews; their general intent is to refute the chargethat he engaged in antisemitism. This short essay is intended as a critique ofjust a few of these apologetics.5

In a recent volume on the holiness of Chesterton, William Oddie didnot merely defend Chesterton from the accusation of antisemitism; heargued that he was in fact a “philosemite.”6 Oddie predominantly relies onmaterial that dates back to the early 1890s. He quotes an entry from Ches-terton’s diary, dated 1891, in which Chesterton wrote that he felt sostrongly about an incident in Russia where a Jewish girl was treated withgreat cruelty that he wanted to “knock some-body down.”7 He also quotes anumber of passages from Chesterton’s school magazine, The Debator, alsofrom 1891, in which Chesterton fantasized about traveling to Russia to fighton behalf of “the Hebrews” suffering in pogroms.8 Oddie cites a poem, “Toa Certain Nation,” published in 1900, to demonstrate that Chesterton wasalso appalled at the persecution of Dreyfus.9 These do indeed reflect Ches-terton’s early attitude toward the persecution of Jews, thereby demonstrat-

4. Chesterton has already been appointed Knight Commander of the Order ofSt. Gregory the Great (by Pius XI in 1934) and Defender of the Catholic Faith (in1936).

5. In this essay I examine only those aspects of Chesterton’s discourse thatrelate to the apologetics examined. This represents a tiny selection of his anti-Jew-ish discourse. For a scholarly introduction to Chesterton’s literary discourse aboutJews, I recommend Bryan Cheyette, Constructions of “The Jew” in English Litera-ture and Society: Racial Representation, 1875-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1993).

6. William Oddie, “The Philosemitism of G. K. Chesterton.” In The Holinessof G. .K. Chesterton, ed. William Oddie (Leominster: Gracewing, 2010), 124-137.This volume contains papers presented by scholars at the 2009 Oxford conference.

7. Diary entry, January 5, 1891, cited by Oddie, “The Philosemitism of G. K.Chesterton,” 127.

8. The Debater, III, 1891, 11, 29, 71, cited by Oddie, “The Philosemitism of G.K. Chesterton,” 128.

9. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Wild Knight, 4th ed. (London: J.M. Dent &Sons, 1914), 92-93.

2011] “SAINT” CHESTERTON 685

ing that Chesterton was by no means consistently antisemitic throughout hislife.

Early into the 20th century, however, largely as a result of his friend-ship with Hilaire Belloc, Chesterton’s attitude toward Dreyfus and Jewsbecame increasingly unsympathetic. By the time of the second edition ofThe Wild Knight, published in 1905, he expressed suspicion at the acquittalof Dreyfus in a new preface for the volume. The preface stated that he wasno longer convinced about the innocence of Dreyfus and that while “theremay have been a fog of injustice in the French courts; I know that there wasa fog of injustice in the English newspapers.” According to the preface,Chesterton was unable to reach a final “verdict on the individual,” which hecame “largely to attribute” to the “acrid and irrational unanimity of theEnglish Press.”10

In letters sent to a periodical in March and April 1911, he denouncedthe type of Jew who “is a traitor in France and a tyrant in England,”11 andstated that in “the case of Dreyfus” he was quite certain that “the Britishpublic was systematically and despotically duped by some power—and Inaturally wonder, what power.”12 The following passage by the narrator ofManalive (1912) would seem to suggest that Chesterton’s belief in the inno-cence of Jews suffering in Russian pogroms had also become somewhatambivalent. The narrator stated: “Wherever there is conflict . . . any soul,personal or racial, unconsciously turns on the world the most hateful of itshundred faces.” In the case of Moses Gould, the Jew in the novel, it was“that smile of the Cynic Triumphant, which has been the tocsin for many acruel riot in Russian villages or mediaeval towns.”13

Another popular defense has been that Chesterton and Israel Zangwillwere friends.14 Michael Coren stated that Zangwill was a friend of Chester-ton, describing them as a “noted literary combination of the time.”15 JosephPearce likewise stated that Israel Zangwill, “that most quintessential of Jew-ish writers,” was someone with whom Chesterton had “remained good

10. The British press almost universally condemned the Dreyfus trial. The sec-ond edition is difficult to locate, but the 1905 preface can be found in the fourthedition. Chesterton, The Wild Knight, 4th ed., xii.

11. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Letter to the Editor: The Jews in Modern Life,”The Nation, March 18, 1911, 1004.

12. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Letter to the Editor: The Jew in Modern Life,”The Nation, April 8, 1911, 58.

13. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Manalive (1912; London: House of Stratus, 2001),137-138.

14. Israel Zangwill was a prominent Anglo-Jewish author and playwright.15. Michael Coren, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton (London:

Jonathan Cape, 1989), 209.


friends from the early years of the century until Zangwill’s death in1926.”16 Neither Coren nor Pearce provided sources with which to verifythis friendship. This has not prevented the alleged friendship being used bymany other admirers of Chesterton, including Ian Boyd from the ChestertonInstitute, Aidan Mackey, and Stratford Caldecott, who cite Coren’s book asif it were evidence.17 The strongest evidence of a friendship, circumstantialat best, is a photo of Chesterton and Zangwill walking side by side afterleaving a meeting about government plans for the censorship of stage playsin 1909. As they both wrote plays, this is not a shocking revelation. Thisphoto was reproduced in an issue of the Chesterton Review with a captionto suggest two friends together.18 The photo probably demonstrates littlebeyond their sharing an interest in government censorship.

In 2008, a special issue of Gilbert Magazine, the periodical of theAmerican Chesterton Society, devoted sixty pages to “Chesterton & theJews.” Its aim was to refute the “mean and wretched lie”19 that Chestertonwas an antisemite. It claimed that Zangwill and Chesterton admired eachother; the same photo can be found on the front cover.20

Prior to 1915, Chesterton had on occasion referred to Zangwill in posi-tive terms, describing him as “a very earnest thinker” and the “nobler sortof Jew.”21 During the first world war, however, he accused Zangwill ofbeing “Pro-German; or at any rate very insufficiently Pro-Ally,” “though heprobably means at most to be Pro-Jew.”22 Whatever the nature of their rela-tionship, it did not prevent Zangwill from describing Chesterton as anantisemite. In The War for the World (1916), Zangwill referred to The New

16. Joseph Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G. K. Chesterton (London:Hodder and Stoughton, 1996), 446.

17. For examples, see: http://www.secondspring.co.uk/spring/semitism11.htm(downloaded July 9, 2011); Aidan Mackey, “Chesterton: Case for the Defence,”The Jewish Chronicle, December 19, 1997, 23; Ian Boyd, Chesterton Review, Vol.XXXII/3&4 (2006), 276. Ironically, Gerald Kaufmann, an Anglo-Jewish politician,wrote a hostile critique of Chesterton but accepted the claim that Zangwill andChesterton were friends. Gerald Kaufmann, “Chesterton’s Final Solution,” TheTimes Higher Education, January 2, 1998, 14.

18. Chesterton Review, vol. XIII/2 (1987), 144-145.19. Dale Ahlquist, Gilbert Magazine, Vol. 12/2&3 (November/December

2008), 20.20. Sean P. Dailey, “Tremendous Trifles,” Gilbert Magazine, Vol. 12/2&3

(November/December 2008), 4.21. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of

Charles Dickens (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1911), x-xi; and Gilbert Keith Ches-terton, “Our Notebook,” Illustrated London News, February 28, 1914, 322.

22. Gilbert Keith Chesterton, “Mr Zangwill on Patriotism,” The New Witness,October 18, 1917, 586-587.

2011] “SAINT” CHESTERTON 687

Witness as the organ of “a band of Jew-baiters,” whose “antisemitism” isrooted in “ignorance, envy and mediaeval prejudice.” He stated that G. K.Chesterton provided the “intellectual side” of the paper, which was, he con-cluded, “not strong except in names.” He suggested that the “conductors” ofThe New Witness would “do better to call it The False Witness.”23 In 1920,Zangwill stated: “In Mr. Chesterton’s own organ, The New Witness—thechange of whose name to The False Witness I have already recom-mended—the most paradoxical accusations against the Jew find Christianhospitality.”24

If Zangwill believed Chesterton was guiltless of antisemitism, then hehad a strange way of showing it.

Another resilient but mendacious defense has been that Chestertoncould not have been an antisemite because the Wiener Library, the UK’skey institute dedicated to researching antisemitism, has defended him fromthe charge. This defense has been recycled in a number of books, newspa-pers, and periodicals.25 The resilience of this myth is demonstrated by thefact that at last count there were nineteen Web sites26 that refer to it, despitethe Wiener Library’s “efforts to have these false attributions removed.”27

The exploitation of the Wiener Library’s name is discussed in the institute’sWinter 2010 newsletter.28

This short essay presents just the tip of the iceberg when it comes toapologetics written to rehabilitate Chesterton’s reputation. They share in

23. Israel Zangwill, The War for the World (London: William Heinemann,1916), 58-59. At this point, the paper was edited by Cecil Chesterton. G. K. Ches-terton was a regular contributor who became editor in October 1916, when Ceciljoined the army, and continued to run the paper when Cecil died in 1918.

24. Israel Zangwill, “The Jewish Bogey (July 1920),” in Speeches, Articles andLetters of Israel Zangwill, ed. Maurice Simon (London: The Soncino Press, 1937),103.

25. For examples, see Coren, Gilbert: The Man Who Was G. K. Chesterton,209-210; Pearce, Wisdom and Innocence, 448; Oddie, “The Philosemitism of G. K.Chesterton,” 130; Ian Boyd, Chesterton Review, Vol. XXXII/3&4 (2006):276.

26. A few examples include knowledge Web sites Wikipedia and Answers.com,the antisemitic Web site Metapedia, and the Roman Catholic Web siteSecondspring:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_K._Chestertonhttp://www.answers.com/topic/g-k-chestertonhttp://en.metapedia.org/wiki/GK_Chestertonhttp://www.secondspring.co.uk/economy/chesterton-anti-semitism.html

27. Ben Barkow, “Director’s Letter,” Wiener Library News, 61 (Winter 2010):2.Ben Barkow is the director of the Wiener Library.

28. Simon Mayers, “G. K. Chesterton and the Wiener Library Defence,” WienerLibrary News, 61 (Winter 2010):10.


common a problematic use of sources. In some cases, such as the Zangwilland Wiener Library defenses, they cite little or no discernable evidence.Considering Chesterton’s discourse about Jews, which was often offensiveand mendacious, the wisdom of considering him a saint and a philosemiteis, from the perspective of promoting understanding rather than misunder-standing between Catholics and Jews, at the very least questionable.

*Simon Mayers is a final-year PhD candidate at the Centre for Jewish Studies inthe University of Manchester. His PhD project, funded by the AHRC, examinesEnglish Catholic constructions of “the Jew” during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries; his main interest is how “the Jews” were represented in news-papers, periodicals, novels and short stories, sermons and pastoral letters. Mayersalso has an interest in Jewish novels and Jewish philosophy.

Nicholas Kristof, Israel, and Double Standards

Jeffrey Grossman*

Over the years, Nicholas Kristof has written several New York Timesop-eds that have demonstrated an appalling nescience regarding their sub-ject matter. For example, in one less than remarkable 2010 opinion piece,“New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer,” Kristof declared: “ThePresident’s Cancer Panel is the Mount Everest of the medical mainstream,so it is astonishing to learn that it is poised to join ranks with the organicfood movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/06/opinion/06kristof.html). In that same op-ed,Kristof went on to advise: “Avoid meats that are cooked well-done.”

Apparently, Kristof was blithely unaware that our bodies consist ofchemicals and that well-done meat (as opposed to charred meat, which canbe carcinogenic) ensures that dangerous bacteria have been killed.

Ignorance, however, has never prevented Kristof from foisting twaddleupon the Times’s readership, particularly with respect to Israel. In anAugust 2011 op-ed, “Seeking Balance on the Mideast” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/04/opinion/seeking-balance-on-the-mideast.html?_r=1&hp),Kristof lambasted Israel at a time when Assad’s tanks were massacring theinhabitants of the Syrian city of Hama. Kristof sought to excuse himself byobserving:

Whenever I write about Israel, I get accused of double standards becauseI don’t spill as much ink denouncing worse abuses by, say, Syria. I pleadguilty. I demand more of Israel partly because my tax dollars supply armsand aid to Israel. I hold democratic allies like Israel to a higher stan-dard—just as I do the U.S.

True, Syria has not been a recipient of U.S. aid. But whereas Egypt hasreceived billions of dollars of American aid, Kristof doesn’t write about thepersecution and murder of its Coptic Christian minority (see, for example,

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http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2011/03/story-nicholas-kristof-isnt-covering-11.html).

And while Pakistan, a democracy of sorts, has also benefited from bil-lions of dollars of U.S. aid while abetting the Taliban in Afghanistan, Kris-tof has been seeking a reduction of tariffs on Pakistani garment exports tothe United States. purportedly in order to fight extremism (see http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/opinion/13kristof.html?hp).

Kristof used “Seeking Balance on the Mideast” to smear Israel’s Oper-ation Cast Lead:

Similarly, when Israel stormed into Gaza in 2008 to halt rocket attacks,more than 1,300 Gazans were killed, according to B’Tselem, a respectedIsraeli human rights group. As Gazan blood flowed, the House, by a voteof 390 to 5, hailed the invasion as “Israel’s right to defend itself.”

Kristof failed to state the number of mortar shells, rockets, and mis-siles fired from Gaza at civilian targets in southern Israel prior to OperationCast Lead—over 8,600—i.e., a hailstorm that would surely be regarded bythe United States or any other Western nation as an act of war, requiringthat it defend itself. Hypothetically, if Cuba were periodically to shell KeyWest and its environs over the course of some eight years, I doubt that anyAmerican government could or would adopt the restraint demonstrated byIsrael prior to Cast Lead.

More odious, however, was how Kristof failed to mention that theaccuracy of B’Tselem’s casualty figures and its impartiality are hotly dis-puted (see, for example, http://maurice-ostroff.tripod.com/id328.html). TheIsrael Defense Forces painstakingly determined that 1,166 Palestiniansdied, of whom only 295 were non-combatants (http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=137286), and these numbers were subsequently confirmedin large part by Hamas (http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=193521). Was this a further manifestation of ignorance on the part of Kris-tof, or was there some other determinant in play?

Kristof followed up on this August 2011 op-ed with another myopicNew York Times opinion piece that appeared in October 2011, “Is Israel ItsOwn Worst Enemy?” (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/06/opinion/kristof-is-israel-its-own-worst-enemy.html?_r=1&hp). Kristof wrote:

These days, the world has been turned upside down. Now it is Israel thatis endangered most by its leaders and maximalist stance. Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu is isolating his country, and, to be blunt, his hardline on settlements seems like a national suicide policy.

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Netanyahu stands in the way of peace? Let’s have a look at his “maxi-malist stance” in his September 2011 speech to the UN:

The settlements have to be—it’s an issue that has to be addressed andresolved in the course of negotiations.

President Abbas, stop walking around this issue. Recognize the Jew-ish state, and make peace with us. In such a genuine peace, Israel is pre-pared to make painful compromises.

Ladies and gentlemen, I continue to hope that President Abbas willbe my partner in peace. I’ve worked hard to advance that peace. The dayI came into office, I called for direct negotiations without preconditions.President Abbas didn’t respond. I outlined a vision of peace of two statesfor two peoples. He still didn’t respond. I removed hundreds of road-blocks and checkpoints to ease freedom of movement in the Palestinianareas; this facilitated a fantastic growth in the Palestinian economy. Butagain—no response. I took the unprecedented step of freezing new build-ings in the settlements for 10 months. No prime minister did that before,ever. Once again—you applaud, but there was no response.

Netanyahu offered to meet with Abbas at the UN, but again, there wasno response from Abbas.

Kristof attacks further. He would have us believe that future Israeliconstruction of 1,100 housing units in the Jersualem neighborhood of Gilomeans that Israel now demands sovereignty over all of Jersualem:

With that diplomatic fight at the United Nations under way, Israel lastweek announced plans for 1,100 new housing units in a part of Jerusalemoutside its pre-1967 borders. Instead of showing appreciation to PresidentObama, Mr. Netanyahu thumbed him in the eye.

O.K., I foresee a torrent of angry responses. I realize that manyinsist that Jerusalem must all belong to Israel in any peace deal anyway,so new settlements there don’t count. But, if that’s your position, thenyou can kiss any peace deal goodbye. Every negotiator knows the frame-work of a peace agreement—1967 borders with land swaps, Jerusalem asthe capital of both Israeli and Palestinian states, only a token right ofreturn—and insistence on a completely Israeli Jerusalem simply meansno peace agreement ever.

This was pure sophistry on Kristof’s part. Every peace proposal prof-fered by former Israeli prime ministers Barak and Olmert to their counter-parts Arafat and Abbas in 2000, 2001, and 2008 was premised upon the1967 lines with land swaps and a division of Jerusalem. In the case ofOlmert’s proposal, it involved sharing of Jerusalem’s holy places. Althoughthey scorned these peace proposals, Arafat and Abbas never contested thatthe Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo would remain with Israel.


Kristof continued:

The Israel Defense Forces can deal with suicide bombers and rocketsfired by Hezbollah. I’m not sure that they can defeat Palestinian womenblocking roads to illegal settlements and willing to endure tear gas andclubbing—with videos promptly posted on YouTube.

Was Kristof referring to those same Palestinian women who arerepeatedly subjected to “honor killings” by their Palestinian male kin?Though Kristof has avoided writing about this horrifying phenomenon, hisattempt at conjuring up a picture of IDF soldiers clubbing Palestinianwomen bordered on a blood libel.

Kristof also blamed Israel for a deterioration of relations with Turkey:“Mr. Netanyahu has also undermined Israeli security by burning bridgeswith Israel’s most important friend in the region, Turkey.”

What about democratic Turkey? There was no mention by Kristof ofthe increasingly radical Islamic stance adopted by Turkey’s ruling AKPparty, its efforts to curry favor with Iran, and its attempts to offer succor tothe Hamas regime in Gaza. There has been no Kristof story about Turkey’soppression of its Kurdish minority; there has been no Kristof op-ed con-cerning Turkey’s imprisonment of journalists. Kristof never bothered to tellthe story of how Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan accepted the Qaddafi2011 Human Rights Prize and then refused to participate in NATO’s opera-tion to dislodge the Libyan tyrant.

And I have yet to see a Kristof piece about child brides (37%) in Tur-key or the spiraling murder rate of women under the current AKPgovernment.

Kristof further declared in this op-ed: “If Jews in the West Bank canvote, then Palestinians there should be able to as well.” But it is Abbas whohas refused to allow West Bank Palestinians to vote. Elected to serve as thepresident of the Palestinian Authority until January 2009, Abbas continuesin his current position without a mandate. It is also peculiar how Kristoffailed to mention that Abbas insists that the future Palestinian state must befree of Jews and that Abbas will not accept Israel as a Jewish state.

Kristof concluded:

Some of my Israeli friends will think I’m unfair and harsh, applyingdouble standards by focusing on Israeli shortcomings while paying lessattention to those of other countries in the region. Fair enough: I pleadguilty. I apply higher standards to a close American ally like Israel that isa huge recipient of American aid.

Friends don’t let friends drive drunk—or drive a diplomatic coursethat leaves their nation veering away from any hope of peace. Today,

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Israel’s leaders sometimes seem to be that country’s worst enemies, andit’s an act of friendship to point that out.

Kristof is a friend of Israel, again fearful of being accused of applyinga double standard? Ridiculous. The former mayor of New York, Ed Koch,has stated that he has “no hesitation in calling Kristof by his rightful name:an enemy of Israel” (http://www.jewishpress.com/pageroute.do/49982/).But from where does Kristof’s enmity toward Israel derive? Is his hostilitythe product of naıvete (akin to “Avoid meats that are cooked well-done”),or is he merely toeing the line with respect to the institutionalized “anti-Zionism” of the left?

Let’s get straight to the point: Is Kristof an unwitting antisemite? Hewould undoubtedly deny this accusation and provide a laundry list of Jew-ish friends and colleagues, but ultimately any such determination woulddepend upon your definition of the term.

According to the “working definition of antisemitism” of the EuropeanForum on Antisemitism (http://www.european-forum-on-antisemitism.org/working-definition-of-antisemitism/english/): “Examples of the ways inwhich antisemitism manifests itself with regard to the State of Israel takinginto account the overall context could include: . . . Applying double stan-dards by requiring of it a behavior not expected or demanded of any otherdemocratic nation.”

If Kristof indeed holds “democratic allies like Israel to a higher stan-dard—just as I do the United States,” where are his recent opinion piecesdecrying civilian casualties in Afghanistan, which have exceeded thoseresulting from Israel’s Operation Cast Lead by a multiple of almost a hun-dred, according to some estimates?

Back in 2002, Kristof wrote a New York Times op-ed, “A MercifulWar” (http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/01/opinion/01KRIS.html?todaysheadlines), justifying civilian casualties resulting from America’s involve-ment in Afghanistan, in which he concluded: “All this underscores a simpletruth, and enough time has passed since Vietnam that we should be able toacknowledge it: Military intervention, even if it means lost innocent liveson both sides, can serve the most humanitarian of goals.”

For 2001-2011, there are estimates that between some 10,000 and30,000 civilians have died in Afghanistan as the result of military activityundertaken by the United States and its allies. Compare this number withthe 295 noncombatants estimated by the IDF to have died in Israel’s Opera-tion Cast Lead, some of whom were murdered by Hamas as Israeli collabo-rators. Whereas Kristof is quick to repeatedly skewer Israel, he has largelyignored the issue of civilian casualties in Afghanistan on the op-ed page ofThe New York Times.


Kristof plainly has no problem ignoring the persecution of 30 millionstateless Kurds, the oppression of Iran’s Baha’is, and the despair of Egypt’sCopts. He clearly holds Israel to rules unlike those that he would set for anyother country, democratic or otherwise, be it Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, or theUnited States. Kristof worries over whether he will be accused of applyinga double standard to Israel, to which concern I would observe that there isan old Jewish maxim applicable to Kristof’s angst: “The hat burns on thehead of the thief.” In the best-case scenario, Kristof is guilty of applyingdouble standards to Israel, notwithstanding his protestations to the contrary.In the worst-case scenario, Kristof is guilty of something far more insidious.

*Jeffrey Grossman, who holds degrees in law and philosophy, is the CEO of Bearand Bird Ltd., a boutique international business advisory firm. He has appeared ontelevision throughout Europe, supplying real-time, on-the-scene commentary dur-ing crises and wartime. Grossman lives in Caesarea, Israel.

The CST: A Vital Partnership

Michael Whine*

The Community Security Trust (CST) provides security and securityadvice for the Jewish community in the United Kingdom. In addition, itmonitors and analyzes antisemitic incidents and political and physicalthreats to the community. The CST has been carrying out these tasks forover twenty years, through its growth and under different names, but keep-ing its organizational core.

Recent political, legal, and cultural developments in Britain haveallowed the CST to expand its role, both within the Jewish and the widercommunity, in keeping with the aspirations of its lay and professional lead-ership and the responsibilities that successive governments wish faith com-munities to adopt. As the oldest non-Christian faith community, with adeveloped organizational and communal capacity dating back over threehundred years, Jews play a disproportionate role in British society, and gov-ernments appreciate any assistance that the CST may give to newer migrantcommunities, especially in combating racism and hate crime. Indeed, theconstant stream of requests from central government has caused severalorganizations, most notably the Board of Deputies of British Jews (the rep-resentative body) and the CST (the Community Defence Agency), to recon-figure their professional structure to meet these calls.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Jewish ex-servicemen returning to Britain at the end of World War IIwere confronted by renewed antisemitism on the streets of London, orga-nized by supporters of Sir Oswald Mosley, who had been released fromprison in 1943 after being interned for three years for his Nazi sympathies.

Having spent six years fighting against Nazism, the ex-servicemenwere unwilling to accept renewed incitement against their community. Asmall group therefore established the 43 Group, which successfully beatMosley’s thugs off the streets. Concurrently, the official body of Jewish war

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veterans—the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen (AJEX)—developed apolicy of seizing the street pitches before the fascists could do so (Beck-man, 1993; Sugarman, 2010).

Twenty years later, when supporters of Colin Jordan’s National Social-ist Movement and of Spearhead, its paramilitary offshoot, began to attackBritain’s synagogues and its growing Afro-Caribbean community, activistswithin the Jewish community developed a similar response, creating the 62Committee (Copsey, 2000; Williams, 1967).

Although their activities were marginal to Britain’s overall politicallife, the far right was not marginal to the life of Britain’s Jews, whobelieved, with some justification, that the governments of the time were notinterested in confronting the intimidation and violence that Jews wereexperiencing and cared only for the maintenance of public order. Englishlaw has always regarded racial incitement as a public-order concern, ratherthan as an offense against the rights or dignity of minorities.

When the Public Order Act was passed, in 1936, as a direct response topro-Nazi provocation, the most important provision, Section 5, made it anoffense “to use threatening, abusive or insulting words or behavior at a pub-lic meeting, with intent to provoke a breach of the peace or whereby abreach of the peace was likely to be occasioned.” It did not address theconsequences of intimidation for the Jewish community (Brownlie, 1968;Malik, 2009).

The Jewish community’s representative body, the Board of Deputiesof British Jews, composed of elected representatives of all synagogues andcommunal institutions but largely led in those days by long-establishedfamilies rather than more recent immigrants, who were experiencingantisemitism on the streets, was also active in lobbying government to crackdown on the extremists’ violence (Langham, 2010; Tilles, 2010).

Despite differences over strategy and tactics, the Board, the 43 Group,the 62 Committee, and the AJEX all shared information on the neo-Naziswith each other, and on occasion with the police (Thayer, 1965). They werealso willing to share their information and experiences with others whowere prepared to combat racism and hate.

These distinct streams within the community, and the differing tacticalapproaches they adopted, were merged in the late 1980s as a consequenceof new strategic thinking and of changes in legislation. The Jewish groupsfelt that the far right, which had been the primary historic source ofantisemitism, was unlikely to fade altogether, but that it was being replacedby threats from new and different directions. The political and socialantisemitism that had, for example, limited Jews’ membership in the higherprofessions or in the commercial institutions of the City of London and

2011] THE CST: A VITAL PARTNERSHIP 697

certain golf clubs, were slowly fading as a consequence of the Holocaust,the creation of the State of Israel, and a more self-assured and assertiveJewish community, which had played a disproportionate part in defeatingNazism and fascism.

Now, a resurgent anti-Zionist left, the overspill of Middle East ten-sions, and Islamism provided new directions from which Jew-hatred wasflowing. Not every criticism of Israel and Zionism was viewed asantisemitic, but on many occasions such comment served to maskantisemitism. Moreover, from the late 1960s until the mid 1980s, terrorismposed actual dangers to Jewish communities around the world. Terrorattacks were perpetrated by Palestinian secular groups, neo-Nazi and whitesupremacist groups, and far-left groups. Iranian proxies—Hizbollah in par-ticular—also targeted Jewish communities, as demonstrated by the 1994AMIA bombing in Buenos Aires. Although terrorism from these sourcespeaked in the mid-1980s, at least in numerical terms, it was replaced after2000 by the threat of terrorism from Al-Qaeda and its affiliates and support-ers in the global jihad movement (CST, 2011a).

The Jewish community also wanted to demonstrate a commitment toaiding newer immigrant communities and fighting racism generally. TheBoard of Deputies had successfully campaigned during the 1960s for legis-lation that guaranteed equality on the one hand, and criminalized incitementto hate on the other. The legislative outcome of this political campaign hadbeen the 1964 Race Relations Act, which, inter alia, made it a crime todiscriminate on racial grounds, and the 1986 Public Order Act, whichcriminalized incitement to racial hatred. Of course, the Board was not theonly champion in these areas, but it did play a major part in drawing publicattention to the malign consequences of discrimination and racism (Boardof Deputies of British Jews, 1969).

As part of its commitment, the Board established the CommunitySecurity Organisation (CSO) in 1986. With its creation, the CSO absorbedand adopted the activism of the 62 Committee and the AJEX, along withthe political defense work of the Board’s Defence Department. In 1994,after changes in charities legislation facilitated the establishment of a stand-alone, not-for-profit body focused on security and defense for the Jewishcommunity, the CSO became the Community Security Trust (CST). Ingranting the CST charitable status, the Charities Commission had insistedthat it incorporate in its instruments a reference to aiding other communi-ties. The CST did precisely this, thereby formalizing its belief that, whileantisemitism is a singular and unique hate form, the fight against antisemit-ism must be carried out in partnership with others, and that the experiencesand techniques gained in doing so should be shared with other victimgroups (CST, 1994).


LEGAL AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS

Along with these internal developments, the British government andits criminal justice agencies were also forced to make substantial changes totheir response to hate crime, from the mid 1990s onward, that benefited theJewish community. The spark for this process was the lamentable failure ofthe Metropolitan Police Service to properly investigate the murder of blackteenager Stephen Lawrence in April 1993, which had set in motion a seriesof investigations and attitudinal changes that led to a radical revision inpolicing and the manner in which it responds to hate crime. The case wasreported in the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report by Sir William MacPher-son (Macpherson, 1999); it is still working its way through the criminaljustice system.

The 1936 Public Order Act, which had been passed to counter the risein prewar pro-Nazi activities, and the 1964 Race Relations Act, which out-lawed racial discrimination, were not designed to address the growth of“institutional racism,” which the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report definedas:

the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate andprofessional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnicorigin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviourwhich amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance,thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority eth-nic people (Macpherson, 1999, 28).

The inquiry made 70 separate recommendations, which went to theheart of police responses to hate crime and were designed “to increase trustand confidence in policing amongst minority ethnic communities.” Amongthem was an agreed definition of a racist incident as: “A racist incident isany incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other per-son”; this is now known as the “Stephen Lawrence test.” Other recommen-dations included: a code of practice for police and criminal justice agenciesthat would allow the reporting of racist incidents 24 hours a day at locationsother than police stations; sharing of information on racist incidents amongthe relevant agencies; the creation of a practical guide for responding toracial incidents; improved liaison with victims and their families; a rebutta-ble presumption that the public interest test be in favor of prosecution forhate crimes; and training reviews for all police officers and scenes of crimeofficers, including racism and cultural diversity training (Macpherson,1969, 327-335).


In 2001, the Crown Prosecution Service commissioned a DiversityMonitoring Project, under the leadership of Professor Gus John, to investi-gate its own institutional practices and to ensure that these were not contrib-uting in any respect to the denial of justice or to a lack of public confidencein prosecution systems on the part of black and other minority communities.The investigation found no evidence of racial discrimination in prosecutiondecision-making, but it did point to some worrying trends about the way inwhich racist crimes were prosecuted, and formulated ten recommendationsto address shortcomings. Among them were the establishment of a commonstandard for casework management, a competency framework for prosecu-tion advocates, the creation and nurturing of an improved management cul-ture, the appointment of specialist prosecutors for racist and religiouscrimes, and the adoption of a holistic approach across the criminal justicesystem (Crown Prosecution Service, 2003).

The recommendation for a holistic approach persuaded the attorneygeneral to establish a task force to analyze the context in which racialcrimes occur, to consider improvements in training, and to devise strategiesfor good practice. Such strategies include the development of commonreporting methods for the police, to include the use of same categories anddefinitions, common protocols, and online reporting of hate crimes; moreeffective police training; systematic victim and defendant monitoring byethnicity; and training for prosecutors and judiciary.

To oversee the recommendations, the Office for Criminal JusticeReform established the Race for Justice Delivery Board, composed ofsenior representatives from the criminal justice agencies, to be advised by asmall committee of civil society representatives, guided by an independentchairman. Following the formation of the Coalition Government in 2010,the committee names were changed to the Hate Crime Advisory Board andAdvisory Group, on which the CST plays an active role representing allfaith groups. These bodies had already moved their affiliation from theHome Office to the Ministry of Justice, from where both continue to meetquarterly (Attorney General’s Office, 2006).

The second substantive development affecting Jewish communal con-cerns was the Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemit-ism in 2006. The initiative for the inquiry came from the chairman of theAll-Party Parliamentary Group Against Antisemitism (PCAA), John Mann,MP, who realized that the nature of antisemitism was changing in the wakeof Middle East developments, as was the direction from which it was nowcoming. This inquiry was chaired by the former minister for Europe, the Rt.Hon. Dr. Denis MacShane, MP, and its membership was drawn from allparliamentary parties; to avoid charges of bias, none of the members wasJewish or represented any significant Jewish constituency.


Over the course of twelve months, the PCAA heard evidence fromgovernment, police, Jewish organizations, Muslim groups, Jewish dayschool principals, journalists, and others. The inquiry made thirty-five rec-ommendations across a range of issues, which included: adoption of theEUMC Working Definition of Antisemitism; greater government supportfor the Jewish community’s security needs; an investigation into the lownumber of prosecutions for antisemitic criminal acts; intensified coopera-tion between the police and CST; commissioned academic research on thecorrelation between conflict in the Middle East and antisemitic attacks;government action on Internet sites that promote antisemitism; the estab-lishment of an academic working party to investigate and take actionagainst antisemitism on British campuses; increased inter-communal dia-logue; and the appointment of a special high-level envoy on antisemitism(Report, 2007).

Two particular recommendations concerned the Crown ProsecutionService, which was asked to investigate the low level of prosecutions forcrimes motivated by antisemitism, and to review cases that had beenbrought before the courts in order to see what lessons could be learned.Again, an inquiry was established to which the CST, along with other Jew-ish organizations, gave evidence. The inquiry established that 69 percent ofcases from the small sample investigated did not progress because of thefailure to identify suspects. In 58 percent of cases that could have beenprosecuted, however, it was the reluctance of witnesses or victims to sup-port a prosecution by, for example, not wishing to give evidence in court,which resulted in cases being dropped. This clearly had implications for theprosecution service and the police, who were failing to pursue cases; bothneeded the assistance of the CST to encourage victims of crime to report theoffenses and to provide counseling where necessary. In this area, the CST iswell placed, having earned the trust of members of the Jewish communityover many years (Crown Prosecution Service, 2008).

The parliamentary inquiry also required action by government, andthat progress be reported. The government’s responses have therefore beenpublished annually for three years, and reflect the progress made in combat-ing antisemitism across a wide spectrum of public life (All-Party Inquiry,2008; All-Party Inquiry, 2010).

The CST played a substantial part in the antisemitism inquiry, both inthe evidence that its staff gave and in assisting other witnesses, such as therepresentatives of the Board of Deputies and the Union of Jewish Students,to frame their evidence. It continues to play a major role in its participationin the Cross-Governmental Working Group to Tackle Antisemitism, whichreviews the progress being made.


THE CST FRAMEWORK

CST’s work is carried out by approximately 3000 volunteers, managedby a professional team that is based in offices in London, Manchester, andLeeds and is overseen by a management board. Entirely self-financing, theCST raises the funds it needs from within the community, although it hasreceived three government grants in the past two years. Its work covers theentire community, from secular to strictly orthodox. In this respect, it isalmost unique among Anglo-Jewish institutions, which engage only to aminimal extent with other Jews in the community. The CST also makes nocharge for its services so that no part of the community should be excluded(CST, 2010).

Security work is concentrated into two areas. The first is the provisionof security advice and training for community members and institutions.Threat assessments, based on the expected participants, guest speakers, andlocal environment, are made for major communal events, and, where neces-sary, teams of trained volunteers provide security. In this capacity, theyoften work closely with the police and venue management, establishingjoint command and control infrastructures where appropriate.

The second area of security work is the provision of advice to Jewishcommunity institutions and the staff who work in them. This includes tech-nical advice for community buildings, and particularly for new buildings,on the basis that security hardening is more effective, and cheaper, at thedesign stage rather than adding it on retroactively. Three years ago, afteranalyzing the nature of terror attacks on synagogues in other countries, andfinding that the majority of injuries and fatalities were caused by bombblast from terrorist attacks, the CST embarked on a multimillion-pound pro-ject to shatterproof the windows of all synagogues and Jewish day schools.At CST urging, at the end of 2010 the UK government agreed to providesubstantial funding for Jewish schools’ security needs, having accepted thatthe Jewish community faces particular terrorist and violence threats (Gove,2010).

A third area, and one that has grown in response to growing needs, isthat of advocacy, public affairs, and communications. Among its manyareas of engagement, the CST is the primary author of communal submis-sions to government inquiries on the related matters of hate crime,counterterrorism, and legislation; participation in police, central govern-ment, and municipal authority advisory groups; and advice to minority faithgroups. Two years ago, the CST began to publish an annual report onantisemitic discourse, and more recently has developed a blog, on whichstaff members comment on current issues of concern to the Jewishcommunity.


The provision of information on political and physical threats to thecommunity is a substantial part of CST work. Its base for information is thecommunity leadership itself, law enforcement, and government, and it hasdeveloped longstanding relationships with many of these municipal leaders,who have come to rely on the quality and timeliness of CST analyses.

On its own initiative, or in response to requests for advice and assis-tance, the CST has provided training on security and responses to hatecrimes to National Churchwatch, a similar but much smaller body than theCST that serves the Anglican Communion, various Hindu temples, Sikhgurdwaras, and, as of 2010, a number of Muslim communities and theirmosques that have been victims of hate crime attacks either by anti-immi-grant groups or from radical Islamists.

In fact, the CST’s relationship with Hindu and Sikh national and localbodies has developed in recent years to form a close, mutually supportiverelationship. This is not just a consequence of the growing diplomatic andcommercial ties between Israel and India, but primarily because the threeethnic-religious groups frequently adopt common public positions and sharea common outlook on many social or political issues. As a consequence,occasional meetings are held between the communities’ professional andlay leaderships, and the CST has provided developmental and infrastructureadvice to the Hindu community, in particular, for over fifteen years.

REPORTING HATE CRIME

The CST began to record antisemitic incidents in the UK in 1984; thisreporting system was changed in 1990 to ensure consistency and greateraccuracy, and to bring it into line with UK criminal justice system classifi-cations and international moves to regularize the gathering of data by Jew-ish communities. Incident reports are gathered from the victims themselves,from press reports, and from the police. The CST has an investigativecapacity that has worked with the police on occasion, and regular meetingsare held with national and local police agencies to facilitate informationexchange and consistency of reporting. The CST’s annual Antisemitic Inci-dents Report has been cited by the British government as the definitivesource of information on the subject for a number of years, although thepolice began to collect their own data, and published the first set of officialfigures in November 2010.

As a result of its experience, the CST has long urged Jewish and othercommunities to standardize data collection and analysis, and it plays anactive role within international agencies to educate law enforcement agen-cies and NGOs (CST, 2011b; Whine, 2009).


In September 2009, the Home Office awarded the CST a substantialgrant from the hate crime section of its Victims’ Fund to assist its workwith victims of antisemitic hate crime—the first time that the CST hadreceived any government funding. The award was one of ten made by thefund to help support a range of organizations working on behalf of hatecrime victims. This is a core element of CST work, and the money helpedstaff and volunteers to support victims, as well as advertise its servicesmore widely through, for example, public advertising on bus stops in Jew-ish areas. At the end of 2010, the CST received a second, smaller grantfrom the same fund. On this occasion, the money has also been used to funda booklet for other communities on reporting and responding to hate crime.It provides a range of practical suggestions based on CST experience (CST,2010). In 2011, the Ministry of Justice gave the CST a grant to develop themeans to report antisemitic incidents on Internet-enabled mobile phones.This is similar to an app, and the QR code can be scanned into a phone fromthe CST Web site.

In early 2011, UK police services launched a national online hatecrime reporting system known as True Vision (see http://www.report-it.org.uk/home). This enables victims to report hate crimes without havingto visit police stations, recognizing that some may be fearful or unable tovisit themselves. In doing so, it meets one of the recommendations urged bythe Macpherson Report. True Vision also facilitates third-party reporting toenable them to report on behalf of victims, a system pioneered by the CSTin conjunction with some police forces. The online system provides safe-guards to protect information, automatically refers reports to local policeforces, and guarantees a 24-hour initial response. Web site sidebar iconsenable victims to access CST reporting mechanisms, and the CST will inturn facilitate referrals to True Vision.

INTERNATIONAL WORK

In early 2011, the CST received a substantial grant payable over twoyears from the European Commission for the Facing Facts project to becarried out in partnership with the Brussels-based European Jewish Infor-mation Centre (CEJI) and the Netherlands-based Centre for Documentationand Information Israel (CIDI).

The project aims to distill the analytical and pedagogical knowledgegained by three experienced Jewish bodies, and extend it to smaller Jewishand other minority communities across Europe. It will focus on establishingnational non-governmental infrastructures and methodologies for collectingdata on antisemitic and other hate crimes.


This is not a new venture for the CST, though the scale of its involve-ment is certainly a change. The CST has maintained relations with Jewishcommunity monitoring bodies for a number of years and routinelyexchanges data with them. Indeed, a glance at the product of some Euro-pean and Commonwealth equivalent bodies illustrates strong similarities intheir names, organizational logos, and presentation styles (see, for example,France’s Service de Protection de la Communaute Juive, http://www.spcj.org).

The dearth of reliable data on hate crimes, including antisemitism, isregularly criticized by the two main monitoring bodies, the European UnionFundamental Rights Agency (FRA, the successor body to the EUMC), andthe Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe Office for Demo-cratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR).

For example, the ODIHR noted in its 2009 Annual Report on HateCrimes in the OSCE Region that:

The full extent of hate crime in the OSCE region continues to beobscured by a lack of adequate or reliable data. Although data collectionby both governments and NGOs improved in 2009, it is clear from theinformation provided to ODIHR that significant gaps in data collectionremain a major obstacle to understanding the scope and nature of hatecrime within most participating States and across the OSCE as a region(ODIHR, 2010, 7).

The CST has sought to involve itself in the process of collecting andanalyzing data at the international level, and, in fact, aside from its liaisonwith and support for other Jewish community agencies, plays an active rolewithin international agencies. The EUMC commissioned a report onantisemitism in 2004 that drew heavily on CST data, and it continues toprovide data and analysis through the University of Warwick, which acts asthe FRA National Focal Point on hate crime data (FRA, 2009).

The CST also participated in the drafting of the EUMC Working Defi-nition of Antisemitism, a specific outcome of the 2004 report, which hadnoted that:

The basic premise for a valid monitoring and analysis of a phenomenonis an adequate definition; and the basic premise for comparability is thecommon use of such an adequate definition within a country, or evenbetter, within the EU. The country-by-country evaluation has shownexplicitly that neither is the case. . . . future data collection and assess-ment should be commonly based on the proposed definition of antisemit-ism. (EUMC, 2004, 24)


Both the U.S. State Department and the ODIHR now recommend theWorking Definition, which can be found at http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/AS-Main-report.pdf.

An indirect outcome of the PCAA’s work was the establishment of theInter-Parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). In Feb-ruary 2009, the British government hosted its first conference and summitfor parliamentarians from around the world, which produced the LondonDeclaration on Combating Antisemitism (ICCA, 2009). With this docu-ment, parliamentarians agreed to press their governments to honor interna-tional agreements such as the OSCE Berlin Declaration that focus oncombating antisemitism. In November 2010, the ICCA held its second con-ference, in Ottawa. The result of this occasion was the Ottawa Protocol,which noted the alarming resurgence in anti-Jewish libels, such as bloodlibels and the publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, andaffirmed the calls from the London conference for governments and interna-tional agencies to take effective action to combat antisemitism (ICCA,2010).

In both conferences, the CST played a substantial role, providingadministrative support and direction, as well as expert presentations for theparticipants. For the first conference, in London, the CST organized theExperts’ Forum, and in 2011 became a member of the ICCA Task Force onInternet Hate, which works separately but in parallel to the main ICCA tocombat the promotion of hate online. In October, the task force held its firsthearing in the British parliament, attended by parliamentarians from diversecountries and Internet experts, at which the CST made a presentation.

Within the Jewish world, the CST was involved in the early discus-sions that led to the formation of the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study ofContemporary Antisemitism and Racism at Tel Aviv University, the pri-mary agency for the collection and analysis of data on antisemitism. CSTstaff draft the UK contributions to the annual Antisemitism WorldwideReport and participate in the biannual meetings of the contributors to theReports. CST analyses also inform the reports of the Monitoring Forum, aswell as the annual report delivered by the Israel government (see http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/).

CST staff provides advice and assessments for the World Jewish Con-gress, the representative body for Jewish communities, and its Europeanaffiliate, the European Jewish Congress. The staff has also participated inall the meetings organized by the Israeli government-sponsored GlobalForum against Antisemitism (www.gfantisemitism.org), again providingexpert presentations and advice.


ASSESSMENT

The CST provides much-needed security advice and training to a com-munity whose members continue to suffer from physical and politicalattacks (CST, 2005). The nature of these threats has changed since the post-war years, but they continue to undermine the community’s self-confidence.The chief rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks, has spoken of the continuing concernof many British Jews, namely, feeling the need to look over their shoulderwhile at the same time participating fully and successfully in political,social, and cultural life in Britain (Sacks, 2011). Neither Sacks, nor the CSTand its leadership, see any inconsistency in this. Indeed, Jews have come toplay a not inconsiderable part in civic life, while recognizing that they mustremain vigilant in safeguarding their position.

The terror threat to the UK, and indeed to other Western states, willrequire a continuing high level of security, and CST expertise in con-fronting such threats is not only in demand by the Jewish community, but isalso given high recognition by government and the police. CST expertise intraining civil society to provide its own security as an adjunct to that pro-vided by the state and its agencies meets the needs of these communities, aswell as the state itself.

Occasional testimony from senior police officers confirms this. In2005, the then commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service, Sir JohnStevens (later Lord Stevens), expressed the opinion that “The CommunitySecurity Trust is one of the finest examples in the world of an effectivecrime prevention partnership that really works hard to make the communitysafer.” Assistant Commissioner David Veness (later Sir Veness) noted, “Ifthe Community Security Trust didn’t exist, we would have to invent some-thing very much like it” (CST, 2005).

The Board of Deputies and the CST have taken a lead in lobbying forlegislation that guarantees freedom from discrimination on the one hand,and freedom from incitement on the other. It has used its historical experi-ence to inform and propel its substantial contribution. Of course, changesthat have been made in British laws in these related fields would not havebeen possible were it not for a wider concern, and the general review andchanges brought about by Britain’s acceptance of international conventionsand legal instruments that came about as a consequence of the SecondWorld War and the universal acceptance of human rights norms.

The Jewish community has seized the opportunities that events haveprovided to campaign for improvements that strengthened both its security,and that of others. It could not have taken these initiatives without changesin British society, and in particular changes in legislation that recognize thesocial harm that incitement to hatred brings; recognition that racism must be


confronted; and, more recently, encouragement by government of a culturethat consults and involves civil society to a greater extent than in the past.

The CST is very much an events- and client-driven organization thatresponds to the needs of the Jewish and increasingly some other minoritycommunities. It draws on the strengths of its predecessor organizations, butit is also clear that it could not have achieved what it has achieved withoutthe parallel political and cultural initiatives that have persuaded successiverecent governments to reform and modernize legislation and involve civilsociety in the criminal justice system and in combating hate crime.

*Michael Whine is government and international affairs director at the CommunitySecurity Trust, defense and group relations director at the Board of Deputies ofBritish Jews, and security consultant to the European Jewish Congress, which healso represents at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).He has been professionally engaged in researching antisemitism and religious andpolitical extremism for twenty-five years, and has published and lectured widely.

Portions of this essay were delivered at the Second International Conference onHate Studies, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, April 6, 2011, and partlypublished in Journal of Hate Studies, 9 (http://journals.gonzaga.edu/index.php/johs/information/authors).

REFERENCES

All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism: Government Response, One Year On ProgressReport. 2008. Cm 7381. London: The Stationery Office.

All-Party Inquiry into Antisemitism: Government Response, Three Years OnProgress Report. 2010. Cm 7991. London: The Stationery Office.

Attorney General’s Office. 2006. Report of the Race for Justice Taskforce. London:Author.

Beckman, Morris. 1993. The 43 Group, 2nd ed. London: Centreprise.Board of Deputies of British Jews. 1969. Improving Race Relations—A Jewish

Contribution. A report and recommendations by the Working Party on RaceRelations. London: Author.

Brownlie, Ian. 1968. The Law Relating to Public Order. London: Butterworth.Community Security Trust (CST). (n.d.). Annual Review 2010. London: Author.

Available at http://thecst.org.uk/docs/Annual%20Review.———. 1994. Declaration of Charitable Trust. London: Author.———. 2005. Working with the Police to Protect the Jewish Community (video

and leaflet). London, Spring 2005.———. 2010. Grant payment. Letter from Home Office to CST, May 14, 2010.———. 2011a. London, UK: Author. Available from http://www.thecst.org.uk/

downloads/Terrorist_Incidents_Report.pdf.


———. 2011b. Antisemitic Incidents Report 2010. Available at http://www.thecst.org.uk/docs/Incidents%20Report%202010.pdf.

Copsey, Nigel. 2000. Anti-Fascism in Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Crown Prosecution Service. 2003. Race for Justice: A Review of CPS Decision

Making for Possible Racial Bias at Each Stage of the Prosecution Process.London: Author. Available at http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/equality/racejustice.html.

——— 2008. The Crown Prosecution Service Response to the All-PartyParliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism. Available at http://www.cps.gov.uk/publications/research/antisemitism.html.

EUMC (European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia). 2004.Manifestations of Antisemitism in the EU 2002-2003. Available from http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/AS-Main-report.pdf.

FRA (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights). 2009. Antisemitism:Summary Overview of the Situation in the European Union, 2001-2008.[Working paper]. Available at http://fra.europa.eu/fraWebsite/attachments/Antisemitism_Update_2009.pdf.

Gove, Michael, MP, personal communication to author, December 8, 2010.ICCA (Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism). 2009. The

London Declaration on Combating Antisemitism. February 17, 2009.Available at http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/corporate/pdf/1151284.pdf.

———. 2010. Ottawa Protocol on Combating Antisemitism. Available at http://www.antisemitism.org/archive/Ottawa-protocol-on-combating-antisemitism.

Langham, Raphael. 2010. 250 Years of Convention and Contention: A History ofthe Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1760-2010. London: VallentineMitchell.

MacPherson, William. 1999. Stephen Lawrence Inquiry: Report of an Inquiry bySir William Macpherson of Cluny. London: The Stationery Office.

Malik, Maleiha. 2009. “Extreme Speech and Liberalism.” In Extreme Speech andDemocracy, Ivan Hare and James Weinstein (Eds.), (chap. 6). London: OxfordUniversity Press.

ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights). 2010. Hate Crimesin the OSCE Region—Incidents and Responses: Annual Report for 2009.Available at http://www.osce.org/odihr/73636.

Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Antisemitism: GovernmentResponse. (2007). Cm 7059. London: The Stationery Office.

Sacks, Jonathan. 2011. “Having Pride in Britain Protects All Cultures.” The Times,February 7, 2011. Retrieved from http://www.thetimes.co.uk.

Sugarman, Martin. 2010. Fighting Back: British Jewry’s Military Contribution inthe Second World War. London: Vallentine Mitchell.

Thayer, George. 1965. “The Yellow Star Movement.” In George Thayer, TheBritish Political Fringe (82-95). London: Anthony Blond.

Tilles, Daniel. 2010. “Some Lesser Known Aspects—The Anti-Fascist Campaignof the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 1936-1940.” In New Directions in


Anglo-Jewish History, Geoffrey Alderman (Ed.), (135-162). Brighton, MA:Academic Studies Press.

U.S. Department of State. 2008. Contemporary Global Antisemitism: A ReportProvided to the United States Congress. Washington DC: Author. Available athttp://www.state.gov/documents/organization/102301.pdf.

Whine, Michael. 2009. “Devising Unified Criteria and Methods of MonitoringAntisemitism.” Jewish Political Studies Review, 21: 1-2.

Williams, David. 1967. Keeping the Peace—The Police and Public Order. London:Hutchinson.

Economic Crisis and Blaming You Know Who:Antisemitism and Nationalism in Austria

Karin Stoegner*

In the autumn of 2008, the Anti-Defamation League expressed concernfor the number of Internet and print media articles being openlyantisemitic.1 The extent of these antisemitic indictments was quite broad,ranging from traditional antisemitic stereotypes, e.g., the greedy Jew, toJewish world conspiracy.

Nationalism and antisemitism are interrelated, as this essay willdemonstrate via samples from two research projects.2 The first part of thearticle provides a brief historical and sociological overview of the national-ism and antisemitism connection. Examples from Austrian print mediaregarding the economic crisis will demonstrate how this connection infusesthe public discourse.

ANTISEMITISM AND NATIONALISM

In European history, times of economic crisis and social transitionhave shown a particular tendency to produce antisemitism as a strategy.

1. http://www.adl.org/.2. Karin Stoegner, “Nationalism and Antisemitism. A Study on their Relations,

continuities and discontinuities from a sociological, political and historical perspec-tive,” Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship carried out at Central EuropeanUniversity, Budapest, 2009-2011; “Antisemitismus und Finanzkrise: Eine Unter-suchung osterreichischer Printmedien,” research project funded by the Jubilaums-fonds der Oesterreichischen Nationalbank, carried out at the Institute of ConflictResearch, Vienna, 2009-2011. I would like to thank my colleagues Karin Bischofand Elke Rajal in Vienna for the fruitful collaboration in the latter project.

711


Both individual and collective domains cope with the demands of moderni-zation and the uncertainty and insecurity that come with with social change.The persistence of antisemitic stereotypes and their constant reoccurrence inever-adapting shapes can be read as an exemplification of the dialectic ofstatic and dynamic characteristics for modern society and sociation: staticpresupposes dynamic, while at the same time dynamic results in static(Adorno 1997a; 1997b).

It has been a major insight of critical theory that in modern societycontinuity cannot be thought without discontinuity. Thus, the status quo onthe level of social structures can be maintained only through discontinuityon the level of social interaction. While life worlds seem to change, powerand domination as the underlying principles of sociation are reproducedthroughout all transformation. In late modern society, real social changethat would result in a society beyond domination is systematically bannedby integrating those very moments that would have the potential to trans-cend the universe of domination (Marcuse 1966). Each economic crisis fun-damentally challenges society and bears the potential to destroy theeconomic and social system. It is interesting to analyze how the phenome-non of crisis is itself integrates into the very structures it threatens. WithMarcuse and Habermas, we can say that social change is being transformedinto a moment of system enhancement (Habermas 1969).

The role of antisemitism in this dialectical process has been broadlyanalyzed in historical studies on antisemitism, e.g., Germany’s 1870sGrunderkrise (Massing 1949) the financial crisis of the 1920s and 1930s(Hanloser 2003), and National Socialism (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002;Horkheimer et al. 1981; Lepsius 1990). Antisemitism has to be viewed notonly as an outlet for the individuals deprived of their traditional certaintiesand bonding, but also as a structural moment effective straight through theindividuals. Furthermore, antisemitism is a phenomenon that incorporatesthe dialectic of static and dynamic. It serves the function of systemenhancement and for this very task occasionally has to take on differentshapes. This is why in spite of all continuity and persistence we cannotassume an eternal antisemitism. It depends on the social constellation inwhich antisemitism appears, and this constellation can only be detected andunderstood when taking into account the necessary differences and changes(cf. Claussen 2000, 66). The assumption of an eternal antisemitism runs therisk of essentialization, and in the end can be seen as a corresponding partof the myth of the eternal Jew—what Walter Benjamin, citing Nietzsche,called the Eternal Return of the Same (Benjamin 2002; 2003). It is the taskof critical antisemitism theory to permeate the foreclosed ideology by accu-rately analyzing the dialectic of continuity and discontinuity of antisemit-ism’s function within society and its manifestations. This is particularly

2011] ECONOMIC CRISIS AND BLAMING YOU KNOW WHO 713

demanded with regard to analyzing and historically situating contemporaryforms of antisemitism that, especially in Germany and Austria, cannot beunderstood without the National Socialist past and the effort of not workingthrough it.

The modern (19th century) nation state—itself an answer to capitalisttransformation (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm 1992)—implicated antisemit-ism as a strategy for national social transformation. These two ideologiesprovided modernization’s anxiety reduction. The intertwining of national-ism and antisemitism reinforced the social structures and became the basisof the whole problem: a structural antagonism ideologically covered bynational antisemitism (Holz 2001; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002; Massing1949; Rensmann 1998; 2004). Thus, antisemitism evolved into a nationalistand voelkisch stance. That the relation between antisemitism and national-ism is so close, especially in the German and Austrian historical context,leads us to the assumption that there must be common features in terms oftheir structures and the functions they serve in modern society.

A core element in antisemitism’s 19th-century rhetoric was the imageof the anti-national Jew (Holz 2001; Rensmann 2004). It implied that Jewswere incapable of building their own nation; instead, they would live asparasites and eternal aliens. The anti-national Jew emerges as a figure thatthreatens the nation from within and without. The stereotype serves as anational projection for unarticulated discomfort. The nation state producedthis anxiety due to its intrinsic contradictions of inclusivity and exclusivity.

The idea of the nation suggests that all members would be equal, thenation itself passed off as homogeneous. But this hypostatized homogeneityclashed with the reality of inequality and social antagonism. So the nationas an ideology had the function of repressively covering a class antagonism.National antisemitism became an effective device to project heterogeneityoutside the nation’s inward and outward borders. The concept of the nationcould be preserved, reflecting a common universal interest—even if it wasat a cost of antisemitism (Adorno 1997b; Horkheimer 1988).

The basis of this ideology can be found in class inequality and non-identity. It is also the basis of an antagonist relationship of the individualand society. Non-identical is also the bourgeois subject (Adorno 1997c), asit unifies two contradictory and competing moments: the bourgeois and thecitoyen. As bourgeois, the individual has to act selfishly and rationally inthe sense of purposive-rational action (Max Weber) and has to act accord-ing to motives that are in opposition to the norms of the citoyennete, whichclaim to act for the good of the nation. Now the chimerical unity of thesystem is maintained throughout this antagonism via collectivizing ideolo-gies, among which antisemitism and nationalism are the most appropriateones. Both bear mythologizing tendencies that make them even more suita-


ble to fill the void the loss of religion has left (Klinger 2008). They bridgethe unbroken need for collective hold in a modern secularized world(Horkheimer 1988). Antisemitism and nationalism both suggest unity andidentity even when there is inequality and antagonism: unity of the in groupagainst an out group. By superficially addressing capitalist class inequities,they serve the ideological function of obscuring social structures.

Both antisemitism and nationalism give the appearance of anti-capital-ist revolt. This pereception focuses on a wrong perception, viz., capitalisteconomy and exploitation expressed as industrial and financial domains.The mediation between the two spheres is blinded out and ideology doesnot recognize that both spheres constitute the capital relationship.

The industrial and financial distinction as two movements independentof each other are used to serve as a basis of antisemitism, e.g., two books byNational Socialist Gottfried Feder—Brechung der Zinsknechtschaft/Aboli-tion of Slavery and Kampf gegen die Hochfinanz/Battle Against HighFinance—were key ideological devices of Nazi propaganda. The corre-sponding division offered competing stereotypes in the respective spheres:the unproductive Jew and the productive Aryan; Jews as exploiters, Aryansas exploited. The ideological reduction is at least twofold: irrespective ofreality, Jews are identified with the financial sphere; and in the financialsphere Jews are made responsible for the evils of capitalism (Horkheimerand Adorno 2002, 142f.).

All capital is seen as exploitive. That exploitation is the nature of capi-talism is thereby willfully concealed. Instead, the exploitive character isprojected onto the financial sector. Financial capital is thought to erode thenational community. By contrast, industrial capital is seen as productiveand rooted in national community.

In modern antisemitism, this division identified financial capital withalienated Jewishness, while industrial capital was aligned with the nation,authenticity, and the Aryan. There was also the abstract and concrete dis-tinction. Jews were to be regarded as abstract, compared to Christians as theconcrete industrial capital of the nation (see Postone 1988, fetishing charac-ter). The function of this ideology was again twofold: to demonize the Jewas international in character while rescuing capitalist production processesfrom criticism. Furthermore, the hypostatization of the nation and industrialcapital as the concrete successfully obscured that in reality the nation wasan abstract form of domination and a repression of peculiarities, especiallywith regard to language (Habermas 1998, 25; Hobsbawm 1992; Volkov2001, 42). The fact that it was about hiding class antagonisms in the nameof the nation can be observed in the ideology of industrial capital beingrooted in national community.


Invariably, a whole archive of antisemitic and nationalist imaginationsdeveloped in the course of the second part of the 19th century. The imagi-nation of a racially pure Aryan nation—as the corresponding part to theanti-national Jew—stands for a yearning for wholeness and unity within amodern world characterized by cleavages and non-identity. So the conceptof the pure nation clearly shows its origin in the fear of insecurities anduncertainties. The reasons for these uncertainties are not sought in antago-nist social structures but projected onto the Jew, who would threaten theunity and pollute the pure nation.

This imaginary Jew was very influential in the 20th century. It is inter-esting to note that many of those images were used to inculcate nationalism.This was the case until National Socialism.

After the murder of European Jews, a change in both the emphasis andthe direction of the antisemitism and nationalism link can be observed.While open and aggressive antisemitism became tabooed and even out-lawed in some circles, this was not nearly the case for nationalism. Themembers of Frankfurt’s Institute of Social Research noted the developmentof a single anti-democratic attitudinal syndrome in which the componentsof antisemitism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and sexism reinforced andstood for each other (Adorno et al. 1967). Thus, while overt antisemitism istabooed to a certain degree, a functionally equivalent ideology was able tocome to the fore. Horkheimer named nationalism as a catalyst of antisemit-ism after 1945, recognizing a national “we” (Horkheimer 1985, 139) thatcovered the need for collective and exclusionary identification so character-istic of Nazi antisemitism. After the Shoah, nationalism could be expressedmore openly than antisemitism and without arousing suspicion. Thus,behind a nationalist discourse of patriotism, old antisemitic ideas could bepreserved.

Given the long history of antisemitism and nationalism in Europe, theclose historical connection and mixing of these two movements becamepart of the cultural and linguistic archive of whole generations. This so-called cultural and ideological heritage is bequeathed to the next generationand can be easily activated (Fine 2010; Habermas 1998). The need to unam-biguously identify oneself to a nation is unbroken because society is stilldeeply antagonistic. Yet the question of identity itself implies a need forand a lack of identity. Invariably, both nationalism and antisemitism enablepeople to overcome the socially induced ambiguity. Both permit the chi-meric identification.


PRINT MEDIA DISCOURSE

How can one transmit antisemitism without an open allusion to theJews? Due to the taboo on manifest antisemitism (Reisigl and Wodak2001), new ways of articulating antisemitic resentments have developed—what Dan Diner calls cleavage products. Except for neo-Nazi circles, wewill probably not observe a coherent antisemitic ideology anymore todaybut rather “particles of resentment” (Diner 2004, 310) that can be connectedeven to allegedly emancipatory narratives.3 The taboo on open antisemitismmakes for creative antisemitism and leads to a dissolution of the traditionalborders while broadening antisemitism’s spectrum (Knothe 2009, 142). Wecan observe this in certain discourses of the left, e.g., an anti-imperialisttouch. Hence, the discourses based on latent antisemitism can do withoutreferences to Jews. Still, they operate with codes that can be understood bythe recipients to be antisemitic.

The specificity of tabooed antisemitism raises the question of inten-tionality being brought forward in antisemitism research. For example,Siegfried Jager (2005, 121) suggests that an utterance is to be interpreted asantisemitic if intentionality on the part of the speaker can be presumed.Apart from the difficulty to detect intentionality on the basis of a singleutterance, this position poses problems. First, we have to decide which ana-lytical level we want to investigate: implicating the speaker or the utterance,and then analyzing it hermeneutically? The corresponding question iswhether antisemitism takes place only within the communicative interac-tion, but the subjects do not understand their speech. Is antisemitism to belocated at the structural level of society that has its effect within communi-cative interaction, be it conscious or not?

Rather than exclusively focusing on one of these levels, it is recom-mended adapting a perspective that considers the constant mediation ofstructure and interaction, society and individual. The complex phenomenonof antisemitism is neither to be located uniquely on the structural level, noruniquely in a subjective sphere of intentional attitude and understanding.One cannot think of an individual understanding that would not reflectsocial structures, as they are being analyzed by looking at how they assertthemselves. If we overemphasize the structural level at the expense of thesubjective one, we fail to recognize social structures as ontological givensthat exist separate from the individuals. Even when social structures take ona reality independent from and against the individuals, they are still consoli-dated and petrified social relations that are constantly reproduced throughthe communicative interaction of the subjects.

3. In Islamic countries or communities, this may be different indeed.


With regard to antisemitism, neglecting the subjective level would alsoessentialize it as an structural given. But then we still need to explain whysome individuals are not antisemitic. Considering only the subjective levelwould imply absolutization of the individual toward the objective condi-tions of sociation. Antisemitism would be moved into a purportedly autono-mous subjective sphere of individual meaning and in the end would becomea question of individual opinion. The individual, hypostatized as absolute,would become an anthropological constant. We see that the two opposedmodes of excluding the dialectics of individual and society lead to similarresults.

Given the tabooed form of Austrian antisemitism, the major taskbecomes to decipher those discursive strands of latent antisemitism. WhenAustrian print media was investigated, several thematic categoriesemerged—a foreshortened capitalism critique, nationalist discourse, global-ization, anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism, post-Holocaust discourse, andgendering. These thematic lines are not necessarily antisemitic, dependingon the context; in addition, such themes are rarely isolated from each otherbut occur in different combinations. The various combinations legitimizethe interpretation that antisemitism is actually under the surface of manifestargumentation.

The results of the study on the current Austrian print media discoursebear a confirmation of Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s assumption that afterthe Shoah, antisemitism is very likely to be covered by nationalist discoursefragments. This can be shown by reference to a reductionist view on capi-talist economy.

The financial sphere is seen as solely accountable for the evil of crisisin capitalism. An example of this is the common way of discussing theAmerican housing bubble as the starter of the crisis. Here we can observethat the financial sector is being made responsible for the hype that led intothe financial disaster of millions of people. But many public debates on thisissue strikingly disregard the actual profit from this hype. Such one-sidedattribution of guilt and responsibility for the crisis in particular, and forexploitation in general, can be observed throughout the whole media corpusthat we have looked at closer.

But there are of course major differences to an open antisemitic dis-course. While in modern antisemitism greediness and exploitation used tobe explicitly identified with the Jews, this is different here: Jews are rarelymentioned directly; instead, the discourse operates with group constructionslike international high finance, greedy speculators who had worked out aconspiracy against the nations, American finance capitalists, and so on.These group constructions are specific in that they intend to construct clear-cut groups to be made responsible for the crisis, thereby ignoring that capi-


tal is a social relationship. This serves the function of personification. Atthe same time, these groups are very cryptic and thus often resemble emptyshells. Hence, they may be filled with any, also antisemitic, meaning on thepart of the readers. The discourse centrally operates with asymmetriccounter concepts (Reinhard Koselleck) that are an intrinsic part of structuralbinarities and exclusions characteristic for everyday understanding. Suchdevices are universally understood and it is only necessary to name one sideof these binary constructions; the corresponding second part will be under-stood by the readers automatically. Thus, if we read about schmarotzendeinternationale Hochfinanz (parasitic international high finance), thisimplies a counterpart, i.e., national productive capital, even if it is notexpressly mentioned. Sometimes the media writers jog the reader’s under-standing by explicitly naming the Volk (the nation) as the counterpart to thehigh finance. Mentioning the Volk alone would not be nationalist orvolkisch from the outset. This way, several metaphors linking high financeand the Volk are constructed with the aim to mark an opposition of self andother. The other/alien becomes identified with “high finance” and repre-sented as unproductive, greedy, cunning, grasping, international, artificial,unauthentic, and rootless, while the Volk stands for the exact opposite char-acteristics. The Volk as the in group are deemed honest, authentic, rooted,productive, and laboring, though exploited and betrayed by the other. Sub-sequently, exploitation is regarded as alien, as coming from outside thenation’s borders, and not as belonging to its own people, while the Volk isrepresented as universally victimized by international high finance.

Consider the rhymes of Wolf Martin, writer for the popular Austriandaily paper Neue Kronen Zeitung.4

Konzerne, Banken, Hochfinanz schmarotzen an der Volkssubstanz undschadigen sie materiell nicht weniger als ideell. Politiker sind ihnenhorig, korrupt und drum total willfahrig. In der EU ist’s konzentriert,was Volker in den Abgrund fuhrt.5

4. Extremely influential in Austria, this paper prints about three million copiesa day. In 2005, it ranked 45 of the 100 biggest newspapers worldwide, which isquite remarkable for such a small country as Austria. Wolf Martin is one of thepaper’s most important columnists, whose daily column has the form of shortrhymes on current political, economic, or social topics. His orientation is right-wing, nationalist, and anti-democratic.

5. “Trusts, banks, high finance batten on the substance of the nation (Volk)and damage it materially no less than spiritually. Politicians are slaves to them,corrupt and thus totally compliant. The EU incorporates all that brings ruin on thenations.” (author translation)


This classic example of nationalist and volkisch ideology operates withcodes of world conspiracy: international high finance is represented asomnipotent and ubiquitous, while non-rooted and non-transparent asmingling into the good national economy and thereby damaging the veryheart of the Volk—its substance—in a material as well as spiritual sense.While here, what is deciphered as bad and ruinous to the nations is notidentified with Jewishness, the codes the author operates with show particu-lar characteristics of modern antisemitism: the word schmarotzen directlypoints to parasites that live on the expense of those they exploit. In thisscenery, high finance is represented as parasitic, international, and root-less—the total other, the anti-national element whose aim is to destroynational community and national wealth. The national element is clearlyopposed to an international or cosmopolitical one.

Who are the Volk whose substance is threatened by the realm of highfinance? In nationalist discourse, this is neither the working or bourgeoisieclass, but the petty bourgeoisie. Nationalism and antisemitism have a ten-dency to hide their extremism behind an ideal of mediocrity, as Sartreshowed in Reflexions sur la question Juive (1946). A particular imaginationof instinctiveness and simpleness as authenticity is in the center of thisidealization of mediocrity. It locates itself halfway between the extremes.As Kurt Lenk (1994) has pointed out, the ideal of mediocrity asserts its ownextremism by seemingly neutralizing the extremes. Neither high finance northe proletariat belong to the idealized mediocrity; instead, they are bothregarded as exaggerated, unnatural, unauthentic, uncertain, and unsettling.In nationalist and antisemitic ideology, it is very much about establishingsecurity and certainty, a feeling that can be provided by belonging to theaverage (cf. Tajfel and Turner 1979). This is a reason that in antisemitismtotally contradictory and opposed moments can be combined into one ideol-ogy: the Jew being identified both with capitalism in the first place—finance capitalism and bolshevism. Both incorporate evil; both would try toestablish the abstract against the concrete Volk.

We see evidence that the need for unambiguous national identificationremains unbroken in periods of crisis. The question of national identity,however, always seems to come up when it is actually a problem of socialdevelopment. The corresponding anxiety that national identity could beundermined or eroded by conspiratorial international evil powers is centralto nationalist ideology. This is a way of dealing with insecurities and uncer-tainties quite familiar from antisemitism—the Jew being imagined as theinternational conspirator who aims at polluting and undermining the pureand authentic Aryan Volk.

This seems to support Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s assumption that theneed for collective and exclusionary identification becomes virulent, espe-


cially when individuals become anxious (Adorno 1997b; Horkheimer1988). In modern society, the individual is hypostatized as an autonomousbeing, while in reality the individuial suffers from constant denigration. Theconditions for individual autonomy—e.g., economic security—are givenbut insufficiently, making the whole concept of the autonomous subjecthighly ambiguous. Nationalism, as with antisemitism, finds a remedy byduplicating and exaggerating the demand of society for identity. The con-straint to unambiguous identification with a national group to which onebelongs is the very heart of nationalism circles. While nationalism purportsto solve the problem of the individual in modern society, it actually deepensit. This becomes evident in that nationalism always needs the other, whichcan be marked as non-identity. Non-identity and abstractness are in the enda container for all that cannot be filled by unambiguous and exclusiveidentification.

So in times of crisis, identity can only be reassured through an eradica-tion of ambiguity, ambivalence, or uncertainty. In antisemitism, these char-acteristics were traditionally ascribed to Jews, who were seen asinternational and cosmopolitan and thus denying the rootedness within thenation. Jews were seen as an anti-nation that endangered the collective holdof nationalist identity (Holz 2001; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002;Rensmann 1998). This habit expresses a deep discomfort with mediationand intermediacy. Economic hatred toward any form of mediation is centralto antisemitism, and Jews are perceived as representatives of the sphere ofcirculation.

This hatred is also expressed in the resentment against other groups,such as intellectuals, who also inhabit an intermediary position in societyand are not part of the immediate production sphere, seemingly do not pro-duce, and therefore remain suspect. The intermediary position in societycontradicts the compulsion to artificial unity and unambiguousness in mod-ern antagonist society, and this is why it is feared and loathed.

This complex problem of identity formation in times of crisis is alsoevident in Austrian print media discourse. The following passage is takenfrom a letter to the editor entitled Weltgeldbetrug! (world money fraud),published in the Neue Kronen Zeitung.6 This letter operates with ratheropen antisemitic allusions.

Die Hochfinanz hat fur sich vorgesorgt und hat die USA und die gesamteWelt dank der Federal Reserve (Fed), des privaten Bankenkartells unterFuhrung der beiden Grossfinanzgruppen Rothschild und Rockefeller,

6. The letters to the editor in the Neue Kronen Zeitung are said to be some-times inauthentic, i.e., written by the editorial staff.


noch im Griff. Reibach in Krisen und Kriegen. John F. Kennedy wolltedie Fed verstaatlichen—doch vor Erbringung des Gesetzes wurde erermordet. [ . . . ] Die Finanzkrise (war) von langer Hand geplant und seitJahren vorbereitet, um tief in die Taschen der Volker zu greifen [ . . . ].Das Volk muss die Politikermarionetten zwingen, dass Schluss gemachtwird mit Globalisierung und Privatisierungswahn [ . . . ]. Ruckbesinnungauf Ethik und Moral, Werte wie Ehre, Familie etc. und weg von der iden-titatslosen “Masse”, die sich willenlos gangeln und ausplundern lasst.(Neue Kronen Zeitung, May 5, 2009)7

Consistent with volkisch ideology, the people shall be rescued bymeans of a return to traditional values; the Volk has to be brought to itssenses, otherwise its unity would become eroded. Due to globalization, theVolk is at risk of losing its honor and identity. Crisis and globalization areargumentatively interwoven in the text and represented as a planned con-spiracy. Interestingly, Rothschild is named, and even though Rockefellerwas not Jewish, he is Jew-like and so the association of conspiracy andJewishness continues. The text goes so far as to insinuate that the financialtrusts Rothschild and Rockefeller were behind the murder of Kennedy. Therhetoric around conspiracy is clear in the representation of the financialcrisis as a planned and well-prepared plot on a global level.

There is a further manifestation of antisemitic discourse in this text asit strategically makes use of the term Reibach, which etymologically stemsfrom Hebrew. This term is commonly used in Viennese German, but whilethe Hebrew word Rewach,8 from which it stems, simply means profit, theterm Reibach in Viennese German also has the connotation of very highprofit made by means of unfair business practices. Reibach is commonlyunderstood as a Jewish word,9 and thus it reinforces the identification of an

7. “High finance has provided for itself and keeps the USA and the wholeworld under control, thanks to the Federal Reserve (the Fed) and the private cartelof banks under the leadership of the two big financial trusts, Rothschild and Rocke-feller—Reibach in crises and wars. John F. Kennedy wanted to socialize the Fed—but before the law was brought in, he had been murdered. [ . . . ] The financialcrisis (was) planned and prepared well in advance in order to break into the pocketsof the nations [ . . . ]. The people have to force the puppets of politicians to put anend to globalization and privatization mania [ . . . ]. What is needed is a return toethics and morals, to values like honour, family, etc., and a departure from the massthat lacks identity and submissively lets itself be kept on puppet strings and preyedon.” (author translation)

8. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_deutscher_W%C3%B6rter_aus_dem_Hebr%C3%A4ische.

9. The word “Reibach” is also used in another article in the Neue KronenZeitung on Bernard Madoff (August 19, 2009), entitled “Der bose Geist der WallStreet” (“The evil spirit of Wall Street”). There, Madoff is described as a typical


evil financial sphere with Jewishness; an identification that was anticipatedby explicitly naming Rothschild and defining a semantic area around inter-national high finance.

The lament over an alleged loss of identity, caused by an international(Jewish) conspiracy of “high finance,” corresponds to the demand to returnto purportedly traditional values. National belonging is set in opposition tointernationalism and loss of identity. The direction of impact is an opposi-tion against cosmopolitanism as well as against transnationalism. The sce-nario of metaphors around an authentic Volk in opposition to a spoon-fedmass without identity addresses the threats coming from globalization. Inthe overall constellation the latter is again identified with Jews, yet withJewish conspiracy, as names connoted with Jewishness (Rothschild) are putin central position. The threat is internationalism—cosmopolitism associ-ated with rootlessness and non-authenticity. Against these “outward” and“alien” threats the Volk has to defend itself by means of a return to “tradi-tional values.” Here it becomes evident that the Volk is exactly the commit-ted and sworn-in community that in nationalism and antisemitism isprojected on the Jews.

The demonization of the financial sphere as an alien and outwardpower that would live at the expense of the Volk and damage its substancelike a parasite is an explicit manifestation of the antisemitic rhetoric—Volk-sfremde Elemente—elements alien to the racially pure nation. Among theprint media texts we looked at, it was found only in articles and letters tothe editor in the Neue Kronen Zeitung. But the corresponding pattern ofargumentation, the central demand for a return to traditional norms and val-ues, are more widespread and occur also in quality Austrian papers, therebyimplying that traditional values in terms of economics sometimes emergedivided between an evil financial sphere and good and real entrepreneurialvalues. So in an article in Der Standard (November 14, 2008), greediness isexclusively attributed to the financial sector, while real entrepreneurship isportrayed as devoid of the base motives attributed to the industrial sector.

The two examples from the Austrian media discussed here, however,show in the first place an open and aggressive anti-Americanism. Mean-while, the interconnection of antisemitism and anti-Americanism is a well-known phenomenon common not only today, but in the fin de siecle (Diner2004; Gilman 1993; Hahn 2003; Marcovits 2007). But while a hundredyears ago antisemitism was in the foreground, this relation has reversed in

“money Jew”: “bose, gierig, verschlagen, durchtrieben” (“evil, greedy, sly, cun-ning”), who only through the belief of others in “Rendite und Reibach” (“yield andReibach”) could become a “Finanzgott” (“financial god”), but who in reality wouldonly be “the evil spirit of Wall Street.”


the second half of 20th century. Now antisemitism is paralleled to anti-Americanism.

ANTISEMITISM AS ANTI-AMERICANISM

It is remarkable how close the dual resentments actually are in theirstructures and contents. America is often viewed as a stronghold of aliena-tion, money, and violence that is driven by greediness, and furthermore asundermining all traditions that encourage unity and the feeling of belonging(Diner 2004, 326). In times of crisis, American investors and speculatorsare the favorite images of the enemy on the part of nationalist actors inEurope. In the current situation, anti-American resentments come readily tohand, just as the American housing bubble is commonly viewed as themajor cause of the global crisis. It often happens that on actual occasionsanti-American stereotypes are applied without recourse—stereotypes thatrecur to threaten a purported essence of America (cf. Rensmann 2008, 409).The figures and cryptic group constructions of the American speculator orthe American high financier are drawn with similar if not the same charac-teristics, as was the case in antisemitic discourses with regard to Jews. Justas in antisemitism, anti-Americanism also operates with a sharply honedcapitalism critique, locating the evil of capitalism solely in uncontrolledfinancial transaction.10

Today, anti-Americanism is one of the most common manifestationsof European nationalism and the need for exclusive identification. The ster-eotyped image of the American as the mastermind behind globalization andmodernization has a long tradition in Europe, and America today is oftenmade responsible for social indifference. The heart of such denunciation,however, is often not an accusation of real neoliberal cutback of socialsecurity measures in Europe, but rather a lament of the loss of an actual orimagined shared identity and community.

Without well-defined hierarchies, the individual today seems to feeladrift and disoriented. With good reason, social isolation is felt as depress-ing, but in public discourse it is too often not viewed as a structural andeconomically mediated problem of late modern sociation, but rather a situa-tion projected on one single responsible element—the American. Due totheir purported lack of tradition, Americans would be to blame for the lossof social relations and hierarchies.

10. There are further similarities between antisemitism and anti-Americanism:e.g., both are predominantly expressed by persons who know neither Americansnor Jews. Thus, the resentment is based on mere images that are largely uncon-nected to reality.


Anti-Americanism as one major contemporary manifestation of Euro-pean nationalism gets further input from the Austrian and German Nazi pastand the widespread unwillingness to take over responsibility for the crimesof national socialism. Thus, anti-Americanism has become a central issue insecondary antisemitism: beneath the resentment against America the hatredagainst the nation that had defeated national socialism can often easily bedeciphered (cf. Rensmann 2004, 243).

CONCLUSION

Conspiracy theories, nationalism, and Manichean worldviews arewidespread today. They each intermingle with the protest against worldimperialism and exploitation. The perspective that exploitation was foundedin financial capital often outweighs a more universal and analytical viewthat sees the reason for the crisis in capital relations. Simple patterns ofexplaining the world, thereby operating with nationalist and conspiratorialdiscourse elements, can be observed plainly in the debates on the currenteconomic crisis in the Austrian print media, especially in the Neue KronenZeitung.

For an analysis regarding the intersection of nationalism and antisemit-ism, it was necessary to look beneath the surface of nationalist argumenta-tion in order to find out whether antisemitic argumentation, consciously ornot, was at stake. In the Austrian media, antisemitic intent is brought for-ward, largely indirectly, by using specific exclusionary semantics, or selfand other. The self is thereby often marked as the Volk, who are perceivedas pure and innocent—victims of international powers. The crucial pointwas to find out where these semantics rely on an essentialization of the selfand the other. Major junctions to antisemitism were observed along the the-matic lines of nationalist identification. It can be said that in a number oftexts we sampled it is about the creation of unity, wholeness, andunambiguousness against those imagined actors and spheres that are consid-ered as not belonging, non-productive, unauthentic, artificial, and rootless.This is a specific framing that personalizes social structures and attributesguilt by using dichotomies of in group and out group, national and anti-national, self and other. Intermediaries are seen as threatening nationalbelonging and certainty, as the evil par excellence. All this strikinglyreminds us of traditional modern antisemitism.

Especially in times of crisis, patterns of antisemitism and nationalismare reactivated and interwoven into simplistic explanations. The world theywant fixes guilt and responsibility for socially induced problems on precastfigures. The intertwining of an exclusionary nationalist form of identifica-tion with antisemitism in whatever latent form proves to be very effective


today—it quietly satisfies the need for certainty, stability, and unambiguousidentity in a crisis-ridden society.

*Karin Stoegner, PhD, studied sociology and history in Vienna and Paris and wroteher doctoral thesis on antisemitism and sexism. From 2009-2011 she held a MarieCurie Fellowship at the Central European University in Budapest. Currently, she islecturer on social theory at the University of Vienna, researcher at the Institute ofConflict Research and co-editor of the Austrian Journal of Political Science. Shecan be reached at [email protected].

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Adorno, Theodor W., Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel J. Levinson, and R. NevittSanford. 1967. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper andBrothers.

Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities. New York: Verso.Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard.———. 2003. “On the Concept of History.” In Selected Writings, 4 1938-1940,

389-400. Cambridge, MA: Belknap/Harvard.Claussen, Detlev. 2000. “Vom Judenhass zum Antisemitismus.” In Aspekte der

Alltagsreligion. Ideologiekritik unter veranderten gesellschaftlichenVerhaltnissen, 65-105. Frankfurt: Verlag Neue Kritik.

Diner, Dan. 2004. “Der Sarkophag zeigt Risse. Uber Israel, Palastina und dieFrage eines neuen Antisemitismus.” In Neuer Antisemitismus? Eine globaleDebatte, edited by Doron Rabinovici, Ulrich Speck, and Natan Sznaider, 310-329. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag

Fine, Robert. 2010. “Nationalism, Postnationalism, Antisemitism: Thoughts on thePolitics of Jurgen Habermas.” In Antisemitismus und die Transformation desNationalen. Osterreichische Zeitschrift fur Politikwissenschaft 4/2010, editedby Karin Stogner and Thomas Schmidinger, 409-420. Vienna: Facultas.

Gilman, Sander L. 1993. Freud, Race, and Gender. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.

Habermas, Jurgen. 1969. Technik und Wissenschaft als Ideologie. Frankfurt:Suhrkamp Verlag.

———. 1998. Die postnationale Konstellation. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.Hahn, Michael. 2003. “Vom Keulenschlag zum Schulterklopfen. Einige

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The Inane Politics of Tony Cliff

Camila Bassi*

No one is obliged to become a Marxist; no one is obliged to swear byLenin’s name. But the whole of the politics . . . was directed towardsthis, that the fetishism of two camps would give way to a third, indepen-dent, sovereign camp of the proletariat, that camp upon which, in pointof fact, the future of humanity depends.

—Leon Trotsky (1938-1939, 996)

On the question of our labor movement’s position on internationalconflicts, the British University and College Union (UCU) has seeminglybeen fixated with an academic boycott of Israel. Yet in actual fact it is asmall bureaucratic layer within this union, the UCU left, that has driven thisobsession over and above the heads of the mass rank and file. This is not tosay that there is not a progressive proportion of the rank and file, who withgood instinct want their union to “do something” in response to the Pales-tinian plight.

The UCU left is a group set up by members of the British-basedSocialist Workers Party (SWP) along with a number of independent-leftunion activists. Rather than a grassroots democratic collective, the UCU leftreflects a bureaucratic stratum that organizes as a block against those to itspolitical right and, more generally, unites in its opposition to the neoliberal-ization of education and Israel’s oppression of Palestine—often a code forthe end of occupation dated from 1948 rather than 1967, thus for the disso-lution of the nation-state of Israel proper. In the years that I have attendedthe UCU Annual Congress, UCU left motions and speeches deliver, at best,a passionate identification with the Palestinian-Arab oppressed, and, atworst, a conflation of the wrongdoings of the Israeli-Jewish state withIsraeli-Jewish workers. Israeli-Jewish workers are singled out like no other

729


group of the working class worldwide now or in recent history, as either inneed of proving themselves politically worthy or in need of penalization forbeing politically depraved.

It is an antisemitic anti-Zionism that ought, more than it does, toshame the union. As a revolutionary socialist intervening into this perenni-ally hostile exchange, my modest efforts fall short in steering this debateaway from a boycott and toward what kind of political solidarity we canforge with our Arab and Jewish labor movement comrades in the OccupiedTerritories of Gaza and the West Bank and in Israel—in particular, politicalsolidarity based on a collective struggle against the Israeli and Palestinianreactionary ruling classes, against Jewish fundamentalism and Islamism,and for a “two nations, two states” settlement on pre-1967 borders.

YGAEL GLUKSTEIN, AKA TONY CLIFF

The founder and key theoretician of the SWP, whose politics infusethe UCU left, is Tony Cliff.

Cliff was born in 1917 in what was then commonly regarded as asouthern region of Syria—Palestine. The son of a Jewish family who sup-ported Zionism, his birth name was Ygael Gluckstein. In 1947, he moved toBritain, where he remained until his death in 2000. During the 1930s and1940s, Cliff wrote a series of articles under the pseudonym L. Rock andlater (1945) as Tony Cliff, calling for an anti-imperialist, independent Araband Jewish labor movement. These early writings of Cliff are notably dif-ferent from his later writings from 1967 onward: on the one hand, this dis-continuity is glossed over by an amnesia or a distortion of Cliff’s ownhistorical analyses and conclusions to fit into a neat picture of the contem-porary; on the other hand, this deterioration is made possible by some earlykernels that later grew into a more recognizable inane politics.

EARLY CLIFF

Not without their shortcomings, Cliff’s writings in the period beforethe formation of the nation-state of Israel are nevertheless an effort towardan independent class-based assessment of concrete conditions. He observedthat the imperialist government of the British Mandate of Palestine “sys-tematically prevented all attempts at effecting reconciliation of the two peo-ples” while a “labour movement as an independent factor exercisinginfluence in political affairs does not yet exist” (Rock 1938a). As “an oldpolicy in new clothing,” he pointed out that, first, British imperialist oppres-sion was directed against the Arab masses, and later (“even if less brutal-ity”) against the Jews, evident in the British fostering of the clerical-

2011] THE INANE POLITICS OF TONY CLIFF 731

fascists, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the services-in-hand of the Germanfascist collaborator, the mufti of Jerusalem (Cliff 1946b).

On the relationship between imperialism and Zionism, Cliff (1945,1946b) was keen to spell out its common and antagonistic tendencies and todraw a class differentiation. Although British imperialism supported a Jew-ish capitalist state, “enveloped by the hatred of colonial masses,” he arguedthat they did not want this state to become too strong (Cliff 1945). Britishimperialist policy on Jewish immigration and colonization was thus duplici-tous. By opening the door on immigration, the British stoked Arab chauvin-ism and gained Jewish sympathy, and by closing the door they stokedJewish chauvinism through the perception of Arab domination over theBritish (Rock 1938a). The Balfour Declaration strengthened “anti-Jewishtendencies among the Arabs” and the position of both Zionism and imperi-alism (Rock 1938a). The leaders of Zionism, who align with British imperi-alism, are not, Cliff (1945) saw, one and the same as the rank and file ofZionism, who are “misled by their leaders into believing that they are notsimply puppets motivated by imperialism for its benefit and their harm:British imperialism tries its best to keep the Jewish and Arab toilers in dif-ferent compartments of the same train speeding toward destruction. TheZionists act in this as the tools of imperialism (Cliff 1946c).

Zionism was defined as a “nationalist reactionary conception,” becauseit diverted from the international class struggle and consolidated itself onworld reaction (Rock 1938b, 1939). Its solution was short lived, with theonly genuine answer lying in the Jewish rank and file’s renouncing theZionist ambition for domination (Cliff 1945).

On anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, one of the major tasks Cliffidentified for an international socialist leadership was to resolve the contra-diction within the Arab nationalist movement: “While the opposition of theArab upper classes to the Jews is reactionary, the struggle of the Arabmasses against Zionism is absolutely progressive” (Rock 1938b).

Cliff expounded that the Arab feudal and semi-capitalist leadersdesired a partnership with British imperialism in an effort to block theobjective capitalist development of a working class which threatened theirown destruction (Rock 1938b, 1945, 1947). Put plainly: “The majority ofthe Arab exploiters—the feudal lords, the compradore bourgeoisie, themerchants and usurers—identify themselves in this matter completely withimperialism” (Cliff 1945); thus, “The Arab feudal lords are no more inter-ested in the real independence of Palestine by the action of the masses, thanare the Zionists” (Cliff 1946c).

By fueling anti-Jewish chauvinism, fascism, and terror, the Arab lead-ers prevented the growth of Arab anti-imperialism while reinforcing theirown position (Rock 1938a). Cliff referred to a period of prosperity between


1932 and 1935, during which time the anti-Jewish economic arguments ofthe Arab leaders weakened their appeal among the Arab masses as incomeand living standards rose “in consequence of Jewish immigration” (Rock1938b). In this same period, however, “the Zionist chauvinist tendencies”among the Jewish masses grew as the international working class move-ment declined (Rock 1938b). Instead of the original slogan, “Palestine, a bi-national state,” the Zionists rallied for “The Jewish state.” Concurrently, theArab leaders were “afraid that the nationalist movement would developalong independent and consistently anti-imperialist lines” (Rock 1938b); assuch, “The present Arab nationalist movement, permeated with anexclusivist spirit in the struggle against the Jews, is fertile soil for chauvin-ist fascist and particularly anti-Jewish ideas” (Rock 1938b).

Connecting British (and later American) imperialism with a class-based understanding of Zionism and the Arab nationalist movement, Cliffconcluded:

Palestine cannot emancipate itself from the imperialist yoke unless a uni-fication of the Arab arid Jewish masses takes place [ . . . ]. The Jewishtoiling masses will not, however, support the anti-imperialist movementif no class differentiation takes place in the Arabian national movement.(Rock 1939)

In light of a weakening international labor movement and a strengthen-ing anti-Jewish chauvinism, Cliff was highly critical of the Comintern’sturn to the Stalinist right; in particular, he was scathing of their analogy ofthe situation in the British Mandate of Palestine with South Africa (Rock1938b): it is “especially dangerous that such a perverted analogy shouldtake root” (Rock 1939). The Jews, he explicated, do not depend on theirexistence by exploiting the Arab masses (Rock 1938b) and, as part of theworking class, are not offered preference by the British imperialists (Rock1939). Moreover, although exclusivist and pro-imperialist propensities existamong the Jews, he makes clear that it is false to see Jewish immigration asconquest and the Jews as an integral part of the imperialist camp, and con-sequently the Arab nationalist struggle as simply a defensive one (Rock1939). The ultimate bankruptcy of the Stalinists was, in Cliff’s mind,expressed during the 1936-1939 protests. Here, the real, progressive anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist aims of the Arab masses were diverted by theArab feudal leaders—“who were agents either of British imperialism or ofGermany and Italy, and sometimes the two together”—into anti-Jewishcommunal terror, which the Palestine Communist Party, in their oppositionto Zionism, blindly supported (Cliff 1945).


For Cliff, the correct Marxist perspective on the conflict derived froma correct assessment of Arab nationalism on the one hand, and Jewishimmigration and settlement on the other hand (Rock 1938a, 1939). On thelatter, Jewish immigration accelerated capitalist development and objec-tively developed a Jewish and Arab working class and anti-imperialistforces (Rock 1938a, 1939). Together, Cliff framed the conflict as a twofoldstruggle between Arab and Jewish exclusive nationalist movements andbetween the Arab masses and Zionism (Rock 1938b), and saw its solutionin the formation of a republic of workers and peasants of the Arab East,with minority autonomous rights for the Jews and others (Cliff 1946b). TheJews were effectively a cushion between the Arab masses and imperialism,and powerless against the world leaders (Cliff 1947). Cliff reasoned that nosignificant anti-Zionist movement developed for two reasons:

First of all, the Jewish masses in Palestine do not yet see in the Arabproletariat a strong ally, which will protect them from all the intriguesand provocations of imperialism, feudalism and Zionism, as till now theArab working class of the whole east has not come to maturity. Secondly,the international working class has not yet appeared as a power strugglingfor the right of asylum in their countries. (Cliff 1947)

That said, Cliff took hope from the largest strike in Palestine’s history,in April 1946, which “proved that while there are not a dozen Arabs whosupport Zionism, there are tens of thousands of Arab workers who are readyto stand shoulder to shoulder with their Jewish class fellows for the defenceof their common class interests” (Cliff 1946a).

The quandary nevertheless was that since only “an internationalistlabour movement can be the leading force in the consistent anti-imperialiststruggle,” and that “such a force does not yet play an important role,” “theJewish masses and the Arab national movement will remain in a difficultand distressed position” (Rock 1939).

LATER CLIFF

Looking back on my own experience in Palestine I can see how today’shorror grew from small beginnings. [ . . . ] I grew up a Zionist, but Zion-ism didn’t have the ugly face we see today. However, there was always afundamental crack between the Zionists and the Arabs. (Cliff 1982)

Absent in Cliff’s writings after 1967 is any endeavor toward an inde-pendent, class-based evaluation of actual conditions of existence. What hepresents is a remarkably one-sided picture of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict:


a dual camp struggle between the persecuted underdog and the fascist andimperialist Chosen One.

The conflict has its origins in Zionist terror, Cliff (1982) asserts, withthe barbarous wars of 1947, 1967, and 1982 increasingly exposing the trueugliness of this terror, including Zionism’s long-term complicity with fas-cism (“Zionist leaders repeatedly told German rulers it would be in theirinterests if Zionism flourished in Palestine” [Cliff 1982]) and imperialism(“Israel is not a colony suppressed by imperialism, but a colony, a settler’scitadel, a launching pad of imperialism” [Cliff 1967/1990]). The 1967 warmarked above all a victory for Western imperialism (Cliff 1967/1990). Cliffstresses an irony that those persecuted by Nazi barbarism now subject thisbarbarism on the Palestinians (Cliff 1982, 1967/1990, 1998). In brief, heconstructs a simple truth that these “monstrosities are the logic of Zionism”(1982) that will continue to escalate.

Cliff (1998) regards the conflict as analogous to apartheid SouthAfrica, except that the black workers were numerically stronger and centralto the economy so could win reforms for themselves. He reasons that, giventhe “Palestinians have not the strength to liberate themselves,” Trotsky’stheory of permanent revolution is applicable (Cliff 1998). Therefore, it isfor the wider Arab working classes to rise up and liberate the Palestiniansand to “stop Zionism and smash imperialism” (Cliff 1982). The only solu-tion is once again “a socialist republic, with full rights for Jews, Kurds andall national minorities” (Cliff 1967/1990), in which, he qualifies, it is “sim-ple hypocrisy to claim that this will menace the Jews of the area” (Cliff1998).

REFLECTIONS

Consideration of the basic role of global and regional imperialistforces in dividing and ruling over the working classes evaporates fromCliff’s later work on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. So too does the classdistinction of all nationalism between the bourgeoisie (whose politicaleconomies dominate) and the proletariat masses. Cliff dramatically ups thewrongdoings of the Zionist leadership as pure and innate to its history andconflates this leadership with the Jewish people, and downplays or erasesthe historical wrongdoings of the Arab nationalist leadership in stokinganti-Jewish chauvinism, fascism, and terror, and in courting imperialism.Also expunged are Cliff’s early criticisms of the Stalinists: in fueling anti-Jewish tendencies, in naively analogizing the conflict with South Africa,and in wrongly seeing the Jews in general as integral to the imperialistcamp. What’s more, these Stalinist shortcomings are ones that a later Cliffdevelops without musing or qualm. In sum, a third camp, Marxism—“to


develop the independent political agency of workers internationally, as aclass capable of self-government in their struggles against capitalism and itsreactionary products” (Bassi 2010, 114)—is thoroughly lost from an “early”to a “late” Cliff. This said, Cliff only ever clumsily attempted third-campMarxism, with some early flaws offering a clue to where his analysis wouldend up.

While recognizing the conflict as one between two exclusivist andchauvinist nationalisms, the leadership of both tailing imperialism, Cliffalways placed ultimate emphasis on the struggle of the Arab masses againstZionism and on the Jewish masses denouncing Zionism. The question ofliberation was always one of the Arab masses winning Arab liberation andindependence, for which the Jews as a minority would, at best, be accom-modated. From early on there were hints within Cliff’s assessment that, enmasse, Jewish workers might be conflated with their ruling class and, as aconsequence, would be singled out as undeserving of their existence in thisterritory:

From the negation of Zionism does not yet follow the negation of theright to existence and extension of the Jewish population in Palestine.This would only be justified if an objectively necessary identity existedbetween this population and Zionism, and if the Jewish population werenecessarily an outpost of British imperialism and nothing more (Rock,1939).

And so emerged Cliff’s later position—which, not incidentally, wasimmediately after the 1967 war:

The Jewish population in Israel is divided into classes and a class strug-gle rends the country. But this in itself does not mean that any significantnumber of Israeli workers are ready to join forces, or will be ready to joinforces, with the Arab anti-imperialist struggle. [ . . . ] While the Jewswere the underdogs of Europe, in the Middle East the Arabs are theunderdogs, and the Israelis the privileged and oppressors, the allies ofimperialism (Cliff 1967/1990).

Here lies the decline of Cliff’s politics into the SWP’s antisemitic anti-Zionist push of an academic boycott of Israel through the UCU left, specifi-cally, an internationally and historically unprecedented writing-off of anentire body of the working class. To understand the final slippage into anunparalleled demand to undo a nation-state already formed and severaldecades old (and accordingly to repudiate a “two nations, two states” settle-ment on pre-1967 borders), one must identify the absence of democracy inCliff’s politics. Though Cliff references “democratisation” (Rock 1938b,


1939, 1946c) more in his early than later writings, throughout these refer-ences he does not grasp the meaning of consistent democracy on thenational question. For Lenin (1913c, 87), not Cliff, the conclusion of Marxis clear:

The working class should be the last to make a fetish of the nationalquestion, since the development of capitalism does not necessarilyawaken all nations to independent life. But to brush aside the massnational movements once they have started, and to refuse to support whatis progressive in them means, in effect, pandering to nationalisticprejudices, that is, recognising “one’s own nation” as a model nation (or,we would add, one possessing the exclusive privilege of forming a state).

Lenin (1913b) recognizes nations as a historically inevitable productand feature of capitalist society, and thus for him mass national movementsare historically legitimate. Furthermore, he applies a principle of consistentdemocracy to the national question: “There is one case in which the Marx-ists are duty bound, if they do not want to betray democracy and the prole-tariat, to defend one special demand in the national question; that is, theright of nations to self-determination (clause 9 of the R.S.D.L.P. Pro-gramme), i.e., the right to political secession” (Lenin 1913a, 7-8).

Lenin continues that the consistent democratic defense of the right ofall nations to self-determination is a negative task: beyond this “border-line[ . . . ] which is often very slight” lies positive work that effectivelystrengthens bourgeois nationalism (1913b, 28). In other words, the recogni-tion and defense of workers’ right to national self-determination does notimpede the task of exposing bourgeois nationalism or agitating againstsecession in favor of the international unity of workers in their class strug-gle against the bourgeoisie (Lenin 1913-1922). Against critics who (in linewith Rosa Luxembourg’s “The National Question and Autonomy” [1908-1909]) argue that such an approach is contradictory and concedes a maxi-mum to nationalism, Lenin (1913c, 84) points out, “In reality, the recogni-tion of the right of all nations to self-determination implies the maximum ofdemocracy and the minimum of nationalism.” On 1948, then, as the U.S.-based revolutionary socialist Hal Draper (1948) clarifies, regardless of whatsocialists might have wished possible in the early years:

A new state has been set up. A people have declared that they want tolive under their own government and determine their own nationaldestiny. They have taken a blank cheque made out to the Right of Self-Determination and have signed their name to it: Israel. And they havesought to cash it in.


To deny the legitimacy of the nation-state of Israel proper, under theguise of justice for the Palestinians—which effectively means taking awaythe right of one group of the working class and handing it over to anothergroup of the working class by way of redress—is to betray the most funda-mental quality of socialism: consistent democracy.

*Camila Bassi (DPhil, University of Sheffield, 2003) teaches at Sheffield HallamUniversity with research interests in the relationship of minority culture to urbanpolitical economy, the competing historical narratives of the Palestinian-Israeliconflict, and, more generally, the return to and reinvigoration of Marx and Marx-ism. She is the author of several papers and book chapters, including the 2010paper “The Anti-Imperialism of Fools: A Cautionary Story of the RevolutionaryLeft Vanguard of England’s Post-9/11 Anti-War Movement” and the forthcom-ing book chapter “Shanghai Goes West: Reflections on the City’s Gay PoliticalEconomy.” Bassi has been an active socialist for over sixteen years.

REFERENCES

Bassi, Camila. 2010. “ ‘The Anti-Imperialism of Fools’: A Cautionary Story on theRevolutionary Socialist Vanguard of England’s Post-9/11 Anti-WarMovement,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 9(2):113-137.

Cliff, Tony. 1945. “The Middle East at the Crossroads,” Marxists Internet Archive,http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/me/index.htm.

———. 1946a. “Palestine Strike: Arabs and Jews Unite,” Marxists InternetArchive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/05/strike.html.

———. 1946b. “A New British Provocation in Palestine,” Marxists InternetArchive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/07/provocation.htm.

———. 1946c. “Terrorism in Palestine: Are the Terrorists Anti-Imperialist?,”Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1946/12/terrorists.html.

———. 1947. “On the Irresponsible Handling of the Palestine Question,” MarxistsInternet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1947/xx/palestine.htm.

———. 1982. “Roots of Israel’s Violence,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1982/04/isrviol.htm.

———. 1967/1990. “The Struggle in the Middle East.” Marxists Internet Archive,http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1990/10/struggleme.htm.

———. 1998. “The Jews, Israel and the Holocaust,” Marxists Internet Archive,http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1998/05/israel.htm.

Draper, Hal. 1948. “How to Defend Israel: A Political Program for IsraeliSocialists,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1948/07/israel.htm.


Lenin, Vladimir. 1913-1922. Questions of National Policy and ProletarianInternationalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers).

———. 1913a. “The National Programme of the R.S.D.L.P.,” in Questions ofNational Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, 5-11.

———. 1913b. “Critical Remarks on the National Question,” in Questions ofNational Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, 12-44.

———. 1913c. “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,” in Questions ofNational Policy and Proletarian Internationalism, 45-104.

Rock, L. 1938a. “British Policy in Palestine,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1938/10/britpol.htm.

———. 1938b, “The Jewish-Arab Conflict,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1938/11/jew-arab.htm.

———. 1939, “Class Politics in Palestine,” Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1939/06/classpol.htm.

Trotsky, Leon. 1938-1939. Writings of Leon Trotsky: Supplement (1934-1940)(New York: Pathfinder).

Sayeeda Warsi: A Trifle Confused

Melanie Phillips*

The co-chairman of Britain’s Conservative Party, Sayeeda Warsi, hasdelivered a speech about antisemitism to the European Institute for theStudy of Antisemitism. I am sure that Baroness Warsi means well. I amsure that she is personally genuinely opposed to bigotry and prejudice inany form. I would therefore like to be able to say it was a fine speech. Icannot do so. Despite much in it that was worthy and unexceptionable, inone vital respect it was a travesty—made no more palatable by the fact thatmany Jews subscribe to precisely the same lethally misguided misapprehen-sion. This revolves around the comforting but mistaken notion that Jewsand Muslims stand shoulder to shoulder against the same threat by racistsand bigots. It’s the argument that says “antisemitism = Islamophobia.” Andit’s the claim that there is nothing intrinsically threatening to Jews withinIslam.

All three—notion, argument, claim—are false. Yet, all three are pro-moted by many Jews; all three were to be found in Baroness Warsi’sspeech. She said: “The ugly strain of antisemitism found in some parts ofthe Muslim community arose in the late 20th century. The point is thatthere’s nothing in our history which suggests that hatred between Muslimand Jews is inevitable.”

This is total rubbish. Muslim persecution of the Jews started in the 7thcentury with the birth of Islam and has continued ever since. It is true thatdown through the decades persecution of the Jews by Christians was moresavage and barbaric than persecution by Muslims. It is also true that therewere periods when Jews prospered under Muslim rule. But the so-called“golden age” for Jews in Muslim lands was very short indeed. The truehistory is a story of humiliation, persecution, and pogroms.

The great medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides was forcedto flee his native Cordoba in Spain (after it was conquered in 1148 by the

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Muslim Almohads, who gave the Jews a choice of conversion, death, orexile). In his Epistle to the Jews of Yemen, written about 1172, Maimonidesrelated news of compulsory conversion for the Jews in Yemen, having“broken our backs . . . astounded and dumbfounded the whole of our com-munity. . . . The Arabs,” he said, “persecuted us severely and passed bane-ful and discriminatory legislation against us . . . Never did a nation molest,degrade, debase and hate us as much as they. . . .” Is there really nothingthat suggests that hatred between Muslim and Jews is inevitable? From mybook, The World Turned Upside Down:

The Qur’an says Islam came before Judaism and Christianity, and wasthe faith practised by Abraham who was a Muslim. (3:67-68). It refers toIslam as the religion of Abraham many times (2:130, 135; 3:95; 4:125;6:161). It teaches that Jews and Christians corrupted their Scriptures soAllah sent a fresh revelation through Mohammed. This cancelled outJudaism and Christianity and brought people back to the one true religionof Islam that Abraham had practiced. After the Jews rejected Moham-med, the Qur’an says the Jews were cursed by Allah (5:78) who trans-formed them into monkeys and pigs as punishment (2:65, 5:60, 7:166). Itaccuses the Jews of corrupting their holy books and removing the partsthat spoke of Mohammed (2:75, cf. verses 76-79, 5:13). It says the Jewswere the greatest enemies of Islam (5:82), that both they and the Chris-tians want Muslims to convert (2:120), that the Jews start wars and causetrouble throughout the earth (5:64, cf. verse 67) and even that they claimto have killed the Messiah (4:157).

As religion historian Paul Merkley observes:

. . . the Qur’an declares that the whole of Jewish scripture from Genesis15 onwards is full of lies. . . . When the Jews refused to accept Islam,Mohammed denounced them as not people of faith. The outcome was theeradication of the Jewish-Arab tribe called the Banu Qurayza. Unable atfirst to break them, Mohammed entered into a truce with them which hebroke, following which he slaughtered the entire Jewish population.Unlike the wars between tribes in the Hebrew Bible, which remainmerely a historical account with no practical application today, the eradi-cation of the Banu Qurayza is constantly alluded to by the Islamists, forwhom it remains an exemplary and timeless call to arms against preciselythe same enemy and with similar tactics.

Baroness Warsi said that Jews were currently targeted by the far leftand the far right. So they are. But she omitted to say that they are alsotargeted by Muslims well beyond the groups she singled out—MuslimsAgainst Crusades, Islam 4 UK, and Al Muhajiroun. She refers to MuslimJudeophobes as “religious fanatics. The people who claim faith drives them

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to acts of hatred . . . but who in reality are nothing more than bigots, whohijack their faith to justify their acts.”

But as author Andrew Bostom (Bostom, The Legacy of IslamicAntisemitism, Prometheus, 2008) notes, Muslim hatred of Jews is rooted inmainstream Koranic exegesis (perhaps someone should give the BaronessBostom’s book). Nothing suggesting that hatred between Muslim and Jewsis inevitable? The late Sheikh Tantawi, the grand mufti of Al Ahzar Univer-sity in Cairo and the most prominent and influential cleric in the SunniMuslim world, used passages from the Koran to depict Jews as enemies ofGod, his prophets, and of Islam itself.

The U.S. media monitoring group CAMERA quotes Tantawi:

Qur’an describes people of the Book in general terms, with negativeattributes like their fanaticism in religion, following a false path. Itdescribes the Jews with their own particular degenerate characteristics,i.e., killing the prophets of God, corrupting his words by putting them inthe wrong places, consuming the people’s wealth frivolously, refusal todistance themselves from the evil they do, and other ugly characteristicscaused by their [ . . . ] deep rooted lasciviousness.

After quoting from the Koran, Tantawi writes, “This means that not allJews are not the same. The good ones become Muslims; the bad ones donot” (Bostom, Legacy, 394).

Matthias Kuntzel, author of Jihad and Jew Hatred (Telos, 2007) pro-vides some other detail about Tantawi. He notes that “Tantawi, the highestSunni Muslim theologian, quotes Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “In resisting theJew, I am doing the work of the Lord.” Kuntzel continues: “He praises TheProtocols of the Elders of Zion, noting without the slightest trace of sympa-thy that “after the publication of the Protocols in Russia, some 10,000 Jewswere killed.”

Tantawi has made a number of other troubling statements. For exam-ple, in 2002, he claimed that Jews are “the enemies of Allah, descendents ofapes and pigs.” The following year, however, Tantawi issued an edictdeclaring that Jews should no longer be described in such a manner, appar-ently under pressure from the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

While Tantawi condemned the September 11, 2001, attacks, he lateraffirmed terrorism against Israelis. In 2002, the Middle East MediaResearch Institute (MEMRI) reported that Tantawi declared that martyrdom(suicide) operations and the killing of civilians are permitted acts and thatmore such attacks should be carried out. Tantawi’s positions were posted ona Web site associated with Al-Azhar (see http://www.lailatalqadr.com/).


To repeat: Sheikh Tantawi was the most prominent religious authorityin Sunni Islam. Does Baroness Warsi also class him as a bigot who hijackedIslam to justify his hatred?

Jews cannot stand shoulder to shoulder with Muslims against attacksby bigots because a disproportionate number of Muslims reportedly harboror even act upon prejudice against Jews. Reports by the Community Secur-ity Trust over the years persistently suggest that, while most attacks on Jewsare carried out by white people, between a quarter and a third of suchattacks where the perpetrators’ appearance has been noted are carried out bypeople described as Asians or Arabs. Opinion polls have also shown thatnearly two-fifths of Britain’s Muslims believe that the Jewish community inBritain are a legitimate target as part of the ongoing struggle for justice inthe Middle East; that more than half believe that British Jews have “toomuch influence over the direction of UK foreign policy”; and that some 46percent think that the Jewish community is “in league with Freemasons tocontrol the media and politics.”

There are Muslims who truly abhor this hatred of Jews among theircommunity—groups like Muslims for Israel, for example, who are truefighters against bigotry, and truly brave. But in order to genuinely condemnsomething, you have to call it out for what it is—as do Muslims for Israel—openly and honestly. Those who condemn anti-Jewish hatred while refusingto identify its perpetrators properly are not in the business of fighting big-otry. They are doing something quite different—to put it most charitably,trying to build bridges between communities in order to defeat hatred.

Of course, such bridge-building is in itself a noble aim. But if in thecause of building bridges between one community and another such peopledeny or sanitize the hatred of one of those communities for the other, theywill inevitably, if inadvertently, end up strengthening that hatred—espe-cially if at the same time they damn those who do tell the truth about this asbigots whose voices must therefore be silenced. Which is what, believe itor not, elements within the Jewish community are shamefully doing—andwhich is why it is perhaps not so surprising that Baroness Warsi is, shall wesay, a trifle confused.

*Melanie Phillips is a British journalist and author, now a political and social issuescolumnist in the Daily Mail. She is the author of All Must Have Prizes, anacclaimed study of Britain’s educational and moral crisis; her latest book is TheWorld Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power(Encounter, April 2010.) Phillips is a strong voice for conservatism, which shebelieves is essential in defending traditional liberal values and culture.

Captain Basto, the Portuguese Dreyfus

Isabel Ferreira Lopes*

An antisemitic act committed by the Portuguese dictatorship continues74 years later to maintain an effect, as that democratic state has not cor-rected the injustice. The victim was my grandfather, Artur Carlos de BarrosBasto, a Portuguese army captain and a practicing Jew who was bannedfrom the army for performing acts of the Jewish religion.

My grandfather came from a family of descendants of Jews whoseancestors had been forced to convert to Catholicism in the 15th century.The great work of my grandfather’s life was to rescue the descendants ofthose forcibly converted to escape the expulsions decreed by King D.Manuel I in 1496, and the persecutions that followed during the Inquisition.

My grandfather toured the country identifying the descendants of thecrypto-Jewish underground, bringing them to light and guarding them fromfeeling diminished as they publicly professed the religion they believed.Donning his military uniform and medals, he traveled among Portugal’sinterior, giving rousing speeches, conducting Jewish services, and seekingto inspire others to follow his example. After centuries of hiding, thousandsof Catholic converted Jewish descendants answered his call and tentativelyagreed to join his movement.

But my grandfather’s love for Judaism and the many hundreds of peo-ple whom he touched did not sit well with the government or with Churchauthorities. They sought to quell his nascent movement by bringing him upon charges connected to the practice of the Jewish religion. At a time, 1937,when antisemitism reigned throughout Europe and millions of humanbeings were murdered, my grandfather was on trial for being a Jew andpracticing the Jewish religion.

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The military council alleged that my grandfather had performed cir-cumcisions on several students of Porto’s Israeli Theological Institute. Fol-lowing a precept of his religion, he professed and stated that he wasexcessively affectionate toward his pupils. In light of these “facts,” theSuperior Disciplinary Council of the Army found that my grandfatherlacked “the capacity for moral prestige of his official duty and decorum ofthe uniform,” punishing him with separation from service. For my grandfa-ther, separation from service constituted a civil death penalty. He was sum-marily suspended from performing his duties, impeded in pursuing hiscareer, banned from wearing his uniform, badges, and military insignia, andforced to forever remain subject to disciplinary action of the Army. In otherwords, he had to maintain his civilian life and religious practice under pen-alty of being retried and reconvicted. “The real crime of Captain BarrosBasto,” notes Portuguese Bar Association president Antonio M. Pinto, “wasin fact the work of rescue of the Marranos.” Pinto then compared my grand-father to Alfred Dreyfus, except that my grandfather had no Zola, who hadfought for justice against Dreyfus’s accusers.

My grandfather never recovered from his public humiliation. Afteryears of emotional and financial difficulties, he died in 1961, almost com-pletely forgotten by the public. His movement collapsed, with many Jewishdescendants fearful that the authorities would not tolerate their return toJudaism.

“One day I will be vindicated!” said my grandfather on his deathbed.We have reached the year 2012. The Portuguese state has not corrected thedecision that destroyed my grandfather. I do not forget that my grandmotherfought hard for the rehabilitation of my grandfather. My mother continuedthis fight. Now I am to fight. Tomorrow, if necessary, it will be mydaughters.

*Isabel Lopes was born in Oporto, Portugal, in 1953. Married with three daughters,Lopes has a background in economics. She is a Board member of the Oporto Jew-ish community, and can be reached at http://ladina.blogspot.com. The author andeditor are appreciative of the contribution of attorney Francisco Garrett, whoassisted with the research for this article.

Last Week, They Defaced My Temple

Barbara Silver*

I was born and grew up in Windsor, Ontario, Canada, a small indus-trial city located across from Detroit. The population is 200,000—and theJews number less than 800. There is a small orthodox and medium-sizeconservative synagogue. The Reformed (liberal) Jews attend the temple. Anincident happened at that temple—my temple—that I thought never would.Spray painted on the temple’s outside walls, doors, and roof were swasti-kas, and the phrase “Free Palestine.” Last week, they defaced my temple.

My background is typical of the Canadian Midwest. In a largely Cath-olic and, of late a Muslim working-class area, I attended Hebrew schoolthree days a week. I was a minority at my public school. Those years werespent starting the day with the Lord’s Prayer and Christian holidays as partof the curriculum. My earliest recollection of antisemitism directed at meby my friends was the timeless indictment of “You’re Jewish, you killedJesus!” Last week, they defaced my temple.

Even so, my love for Judaism and my Jewish identity flourished. Threefactors accounted for this. First, my innate sense of self and the friendshipsformed at Hebrew school and Jewish day camp; second, the commitmentboth parents made as presidents of B’nai B’rith Men and Jewish WomenInternational of Canada; and, most deeply, the life-changing experience ofmy student trip to Israel. Not only did this trip solidify my Jewishness, butit also began a lifelong passion for Zionism. In addition, the trip opened myeyes to the fact that I was living in a small city with few Jewish influencesand culture. Windsor does have an inclusive Jewish community where indi-viduals join together to celebrate holidays and Israel Independence Day, but

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it is always kept private lest the neighbors get angry at us. Last week, theydefaced my temple.

Windsor still experiences antisemitism, although in comparison tolarger cities it is on a small scale. While my daughter’s friend attended highschool, a swastika was spray painted on her locker with a letter was writtento her about the Nazis coming for her. References were made about the carshe drove and the big home she lived in. Canada has always prided itself asbeing a nation of immigrants, but now the hate has been imported. Theformula is always the same—jealousy and ignorance and the reliance onwhat others say to ignite primal fear and anger. I guess that’s what theywant—to make us as afraid and angry as they are. I won’t go down thatroad. My hope is for it to stop—but this has not been the history of theJews. Last week, they defaced my temple.

*Barbara Silver is a retired childcare educator in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Shecan be contacted at [email protected].

Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism

Kenneth L. Marcus’sJewish Identity and Civil Rights in America

(Cambridge University Press, 2010). xi + 211 pp. paperback, £52/$29

Lesley D. Klaff*

This review is dedicated to the memory of my father, Bernard D. Blank 1927-2011,who fought for Machal’s 7th Brigade in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence.

I was delighted when JSA editor Steven Baum asked me to reviewJewish Identity and Civil Rights in America for this special issue on campusantisemitism. This is because Jewish Identity is a seminal and comprehen-sive text on the new campus antisemitism, and it was written by this specialissue’s guest editor, Kenneth L. Marcus.

Marcus’s credentials make him arguably America’s foremost expert onthe resurgence of antisemitism in American higher education. He is theexecutive vice president and director of the Antisemitism Initiative inHigher Education at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research(IJCR) and was formerly staff director of the U.S. Commission on CivilRights, where he served as the agency’s chief executive officer. Prior tothat, he was delegated authority as assistant secretary of education for civilrights, and served simultaneously as deputy assistant secretary of educationfor enforcement in the Office for Civil Rights. He also served in an aca-demic position in 2008 as the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Visiting Profes-

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sor of Equality and Justice in America at Baruch College, City Universityof New York. His experience as civil rights lawyer, policy maker, activist,and academic inform and illuminate his writing in Jewish Identity and CivilRights in America, resulting in a book that addresses and deconstructs allthe issues pertinent to the reemergence of antisemitism on American col-lege campuses.

Since the start of the Second Intifada in 2000, and exacerbated by theevents of 9/11, a “pernicious movement” to defame Israel, Zionism, and theJews has gathered speed and is “trying to flood into America through theclassroom door.”1

University-sponsored events involving extremist political activitiesopenly vilify Israel and its supporters. Moreover, anti-Israel and evenantisemitic professors have acquired a disproportionate influence in someAmerican universities. These professors conflate academic freedom withpolitical indoctrination and openly express hostility to Israel and its sup-porters in the classroom. This is not only apparent in academic treatmentsof the Middle East but is also, unfortunately, a feature of several JewishStudies departments, which have provided a welcome home to Jewish anti-Zionist professors. All this has resulted in the creation of a hostile campusenvironment for Jewish students, wherein they feel harassed and intimi-dated. Significantly, it denies them equality of educational opportunity, aninterest that has been preeminent since the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court deci-sion of Brown v. Board of Education.

This situation on campus is the context for Ken Marcus’s book. Theauthor takes as his central theme the failure of the federal government tointervene to protect Jewish students from discrimination, in particular hos-tile environment harassment on campus. Drawing on his experiences withthe Office for Civil Rights (OCR) of the United States Department of Edu-cation, America’s primary enforcement agency in cases involving educationand civil rights, Marcus offers the reader invaluable insights into the con-ceptual, legal, and political obstacles that have prevented Jewish studentsfrom receiving civil rights protections in American higher education.

The book has several interrelated topics as its focus. These are the on-campus campaign to delegitimize Israel and why this is antisemitic; thefailure of the universities themselves to address the problem of antisemitismon campus; the traditional reluctance of the OCR to investigate allegationsof antisemitism on campus; the legal and moral basis for interpreting andextending the civil rights legislation to protect Jewish students fromantisemitism on campus; and the nature of Jewish identity, including what it

1. Jonathan S. Tobin, “The Reality of Campus Antisemitism,” Commentary,April 22, 2011.

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means to be Jewish, to be the subject of Jew-hatred, and even to be anantisemite. Logically structured and lucidly written, Marcus’s study offers awealth of information and insight in a way that makes its currency tran-scend recent events even as it delves into the core issue of how antisemitismimpacts on the dilemma of Jewish difference.

Early in the book, Marcus exposes the reader to the realities of the on-campus delegitimization campaign, which he calls the “new campusantisemitism,” with a description of a spate of incidents at the University ofCalifornia Irvine, San Francisco State, and Columbia University. In the caseof UC Irvine, and during Marcus’s tenure as staff director at the UnitedStates Commission on Civil Rights, the Zionist Organization of America(ZOA) filed a complaint against the university with the OCR’s Departmentof Education. The complaint alleged specific incidents of anti-Israel speechpolluted by the blood libel, conspiracy theory, Holocaust inversion, and eth-nic stereotypes. In some instances, the speech was accompanied by physicalintimidation and threats, violence, and vandalism directed at Jewish stu-dents and property. The San Francisco campus sported flyers advertising apro-Palestinian rally that “. . . featured a picture of a dead baby, with thewords, ‘Canned Palestinian Children Meat—Slaughtered according to Jew-ish rites under American License . . .’ ” (37). At Columbia, professorsteaching in the Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures programallegedly used their lectures to demonize Israel and to advance antisemiticstereotypes. For instance, one Professor Hamid Dabashi allegedly wrotethat Israelis have “a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structuralto the skeletal vertebrae of [their] culture” (39).

Marcus uses each of these university case studies to illustrate thenature and extent of the on-campus antisemitic abuse. He makes it clear thatwhat has been happening on the American campus goes well beyond thefree exchange of ideas about the Israel/Palestine conflict and insteadamounts to the unlawful harassment of Jewish students and the creation of ahostile university environment. Marcus notes the paradox that in a goldenage for American Jewish students, when there is a proliferation of HillelHouses, Jewish Studies departments, Israel Studies classes, and Jewish stu-dents and faculty, growing anti-Israel extremism on campus is putting Jew-ish students at risk of physical harm.

Marcus juxtaposes this unacceptable campus situation with the disap-pointing response of the university officials and administrators who over-whelmingly fail to take seriously student complaints of antisemitism. Onlythe president of San Francisco State, Robert A. Corrigan, denounced the“blood libel” flyers as hate speech that offended the entire university com-munity. In sharp contrast, the UC Irvine officials reacted with silence andpassivity. For example, when in 2002 one Jewish student expressed her


fears to the chancellor and other campus administrators that she was afraidof being physically attacked if she identified herself as a Jew or as a sup-porter of Israel, the chancellor failed to respond to her letter. Instead, anadministrator advised the student to seek psychological counseling fromstudent services. Even worse, the vice chancellor for student affairs, MiguelGomez, sought to challenge the existence of antisemitic hate speech byclaiming that “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”2

Drawing on the work of Deborah Lipstadt, the late Gary Tobin, andformer Commentary editor Gabriel Schoenfeld, Marcus offers several theo-ries on why academia has become so instrumental in the propagation ofantisemitic anti-Zionism. The reader learns that the politics of many Ameri-can college faculties has become overwhelmingly liberal, and contemporaryanti-Zionism tends to concentrate on the left. This is because it is an ideol-ogy that fits in well with anti-Western, anti-American, antiwar, and otherideologies that are common on college campuses. For this reason, anti-Zionist groups have actually targeted campuses as an arena for expressingtheir anti-Israel agenda. The situation is made worse by the fact that extrem-ist voices are disproportionately influential on college campuses “and arefrequently able to capture organizational apparatuses even when they do notcommand majority support” (51). To compound the problem, as seen in thereaction at UC Irvine and Columbia, many universities have failed to takeappropriate action to prevent the spread of antisemitism, largely as a resultof bureaucratic inertia. Also, university administrators, officials, and facultyhave failed to stand up to the perpetrators of antisemitic incidents for fear ofinviting confrontation, appearing overzealous or interfering with academicfreedom, or because they do not want to oppose Muslim/progressive bias oncampus, or because, since the Oslo accords, Israel has been depicted as theoppressor.

Especially helpful for the understanding of how anti-Zionism hasbecome polluted by antisemitism is an entire chapter, “The New CampusAntisemitism,” which gives an exhaustive overview of extant scholarshipon the phenomenon. Included are official definitions of the “New antisemit-ism,” such as the “working definition” of the European Union Agency forFundamental Rights and other sources, including the United Kingdom’s AllParliamentary Group Against Antisemitism. Essential criteria are provided,enabling the reader to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel andantisemitism—and to see how, thanks to Marcus’s rigorous analysis, cam-pus antisemitism has evolved from a sophisticated prejudice to a fullydeveloped ideology fueled by the warped criteria of the anti-racist left.

2. http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=23112_Irvine_One_Persons_Hate_Speech_is_Another_Persons_Education&only.


With respect to the book’s central theme, which is the long-time fail-ure of the federal government to intervene to protect Jewish students fromantisemitism on campus, we learn that beginning with the administration ofPresident Jimmy Carter, the OCR had traditionally operated a hands-offpolicy with respect to anti-Jewish bias on campus. This is because of itsdetermination that antisemitism does not constitute discrimination on thebasis of “race” or “national origin” for the purposes of Title VI of the CivilRights Act of 1964. Title VI is a U.S. federal civil rights statute that prohib-its discrimination in federally assisted programs and activities in (virtuallyall) public and private universities and colleges on the basis of “race, color,or national origin.” The OCR has conventionally taken the view that Juda-ism is merely a religion, placing Jewish students beyond the reach of TitleVI’s statutory civil rights protection.

This act has deprived Jews of any legal means of redress with respectto the outbreaks of campus antisemitism so vividly described in the book—a serious civil rights issue, particularly in the absence of any legislation toaddress religious discrimination in the educational setting. As Marcus notes,“constitutional rights have little worth if they are not backed by effectiveenforcement schemes” (9). While it is true that other religious minority stu-dents, such as Muslims and Sikhs, are in the same invidious position when-ever they experience discrimination or harassment in public and privateuniversities, for Jewish students “the [problem] is easily solvable because itis well established that antisemitism may take several forms, including notonly religious, but also ethnic and racial animus” (9). This has even beenrecognized by the U.S. State Department, which has defined antisemitismas “hostility toward or discrimination against Jews as an ethnic, racial, orreligious group” (9). Indeed, it is in his subsequent exposition on the natureof the antisemitic animus as racial and ethnic, as well as religious, thatMarcus’s book is at its most illuminating.

Marcus explains the OCR failure to recognize Jews as a race for thepurposes of Title VI in terms of what the legal scholar Kenneth Karst hasreferred to as the “dilemma of difference” (24). This occurs where an“agency like the OCR is faced with an unpalatable choice: either use aracial category and reinforce socially constructed differences and stereo-types, or deny the racial category and deprive the group protection fromdiscrimination” (29).

Marcus notes the views of critical feminist scholar and dean ofHarvard Law School Martha Minow, who has argued that the latteroption—depriving the minority group of the classification needed to affordit legal protection from discrimination—is not an option because it “ironi-cally allows bigots to reinforce the very difference that the agency isunwilling to invoke” (24). Certainly, from the perspective of someone like


myself, who is trained in the English legal system—where the question ofwhether or not Jews should be regarded as a “race” for the purposes of theanti-discrimination law has never been doubted—I found the OCR attitudeto be somewhat short-sighted. Whether Jews constitute a race in biologicalterms is surely not the issue; what counts is their legal status as a “race” inorder to give them civil rights protection from discrimination. Indeed, Mar-cus draws on both English and American case law to demonstrate that judi-cial recognition of Jews as a race for purposes of anti-discrimination lawdoes not require judicial recognition of the concept of biological race. Nev-ertheless, the fear of conceptualizing Jews as a race because of the genoci-dal ramifications of the last century—otherwise known as Karst’sConundrum—is perhaps an understandable, if somewhat myopic, reason forthe OCR’s reluctance to investigate claims of antisemitism on campus. Thisevidently remained the case until 2004.

Then, Marcus, as the OCR staff director, issued a series of policy state-ments announcing that henceforth “OCR would have jurisdiction under cer-tain circumstances to investigate whether discrimination against [ ] a Jewishstudent [is] in fact prohibited by the Title VI ban on national origin discrim-ination” (31). This was an interpretation of federal policy that would extendTitle VI protection to Jewish students, as well as to Muslim and Sikh stu-dents. Known as the “Marcus Policy,” or the “2004 Policy,” it announcedthat discrimination on the basis of ancestral or ethnic characteristics is noless permissible against groups that also have religious attributes thanagainst those who do not. The 2004 Policy amounted to OCR recognitionthat antisemitism can take several forms, including not only religious butalso ethnic and racial animus. Marcus was careful, however, to use the term“national origin discrimination” rather than “race discrimination” in his pol-icy statement because of concern for people’s sensitivities to the term“race.”

Marcus issued his groundbreaking 2004 Policy just prior to the filingof the ZOA’s Irvine complaint described above. It permitted the OCR toinvestigate the allegations, which “described an extraordinary pattern ofantisemitic intimidation, harassment, threats, and vandalism” (17) on theUC Irvine campus. Soon after the investigation opened, Marcus left theOCR to take up his position as staff director at the U.S. Commission onCivil Rights, and his successor, one Stefanie Monroe (somewhat disingenu-ously, it seems), pulled back from the 2004 Policy because she believed thatantisemitism is nothing more than religious discrimination, over which theOCR lacks subject-matter jurisdiction. Her position, apparently endorsed byothers in her office, led to the OCR’s dismissal of the complaint in Novem-ber 2007, mostly on technical grounds, even though the career officials whoconducted the investigation concluded that a hostile environment for Jewish


students had been formed at UC Irvine. Moreover, Monroe’s misguidedunderstanding of the nature of antisemitism also meant that between 2005and 2010, for the duration of her tenure, the 2004 Policy had no impactwhatever. This is despite its endorsement in 2006 by the U.S. Commissionon Civil Rights, which noted that “[M]any college campuses throughout theunited states continue to experience incidents of antisemitism” and agreedwith the 2004 Policy’s conclusion that antisemitic incidents on college cam-puses “when severe, persistent or pervasive . . . may constitute a hostileenvironment for students in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act1964” (44-45). OCR resistance to the 2004 Policy remained, however,despite prodding from various members of Congress.

As Marcus notes, Monroe’s failure to understand what historianEdward S. Shapiro referred to as “the perplexing nature of what it means tobe Jewish” meant that she “predetermined the outcome of all cases allegingdiscrimination against Jews” (12, 47). But this was not the only reason forthe OCR’s disinclination to conclude that certain on-campus activityamounted to antisemitic abuse: the OCR also dismissed the Irvine com-plaint because its political leadership failed to grasp the extent to whichanti-Zionist rhetoric is antisemitic and not merely anti-Israel. Accordingly,Marcus uses the Irvine complaint and the OCR dismissal of the evidence asan effective vehicle to pursue two significant topics in his book: the natureof Jewish identity and the extent to which anti-Zionist conduct and speechare also antisemitic.

Marcus’s discussion and analysis of the OCR’s approach to the inves-tigation of the Irvine complaint is noteworthy for another reason: the readeris treated to a thoroughly interesting and most satisfying, never-before-revealed-to-the-public expose of internal wrangles, dissension, accusations,recriminations, personality clashes, and even seemingly justifiable allega-tions of antisemitism made by those who conducted the investigationagainst their OCR superiors. Marcus presents this gripping expose by draw-ing on his own experience, as well as on official witness interviews con-ducted for the purposes of subsequent litigation, which had been obtainedby the IJCR under the Freedom of Information Act. We also learn of theOCR leadership’s attempts at obfuscation and the disingenuous way inwhich it conducted the Irvine investigation. The reader is left with theimpression of an office that was wholly ill equipped to extend Title VI toprotect Jewish students from antisemitic harassment on campus.

Shortly after the book’s publication, however, on October 26, 2010,the U.S. Justice Department stated definitively in an Opinion Letter that theOCR should henceforth intervene to protect Jewish students from a hostileenvironment on campus. At the same time, Assistant Secretary RusslynnAli affirmed the 2004 Marcus Policy in a guidance letter to recipients of


federal funding. Known as the “Ali Policy,” the new policy not only adoptsthe 2004 policy but also contains some important embellishments that areessential in the fightback against campus antisemitism. This change in thegovernment’s policy to campus antisemitism is a result of a lengthy IJCRcampaign headed by Marcus and followed by other organizations such asthe ZOA. Marcus has since stated that the question is now whether theObama administration will enforce the Ali Policy even in cases where theperpetrators are associated more with the left than the right.3

Perhaps unexpectedly, the Ali Policy was challenged in April 2011 byCary Nelson, president of the American Association of University Profes-sors (AAUP), and Kenneth Stern, a specialist on antisemitism and extrem-ism at the American Jewish Committee (AJC). In a joint AJC-AAUPstatement, both contended that recent events on American university cam-puses, such as those seen at Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Rutgers, in additionto those previously witnessed at UC Irvine, do not rise to the level of theEUMC’s working definition of antisemitism. This definition includes asevidence of antisemitism any criticism of Israel that is not legitimate, suchas comparing contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis, or claimingIsrael is a racist endeavor, or using symbols and images associated withclassic antisemitism to characterize Israel or Israelis. Nelson and Sternstated that the Ali Policy amounts to a censorship of anti-Israel remarks,which stifles on-campus political debate. They claimed that the best way torespond is for the supporters of Israel to argue against these views.

Marcus presumably anticipated this criticism, because Jewish Identityand Civil Rights in America includes a compelling response to his critics. Inhis chapter “Criticism,” he argues convincingly that the on-campus delegi-timization campaign does not allow for a free exchange of ideas aboutIsraeli policies, but rather creates a spirit of intolerance and an atmosphereof hatred that chills free speech and open debate. The fact is that because ofthe hostile atmosphere on campus, because of the threats and intimidation,Jewish students and other supporters of Israel are afraid to speak out.Indeed, drawing on the work of notable scholars like Catherine Mackinnonand Stanley Fish, Marcus acknowledges that Title VI does not permit uni-versities to regulate or censor speech that is protected under the FirstAmendment. If such speech creates a hostile environment, then it must bedealt with in some other way, other than by penalizing the harasser. In fact,the OCR itself announced prior to the issuance of the 2004 Policy guidancethat its policies should never be interpreted in a manner that conflicts withconstitutional protections for speech and expressive conduct. In August

3. Kenneth L. Marcus, “Fighting Back Against Campus Antisemitism,” Mind-ing the Campus, March 28, 2011.


2011, the AJC’s executive director, David Harris, renounced the organiza-tion’s joint AJC–AAUP statement as ill advised.

This brings us to the key question in the book: whether there is a moraland legal basis for interpreting and extending the Title VI Civil Rights Actof 1964 to protect Jewish students. Marcus presents cogent arguments foranswering both affirmatively. The moral rationale is that Jew-hatred—or,indeed, hatred of Sikhs and Muslims, for whom the case is equally made, ifless explicitly—must be treated no differently from bigotry against anyother minority group. Moreover, in the absence of federal legislation to pro-hibit religious discrimination in education, the failure to extend Title VI toethno-religious groups leaves them without any protection from discrimina-tion or harassment in federally funded higher education programs. ForJews, this is particularly problematic in an age in which “no other group [ ]on campus has been subjected to such hostile and demonizing criticism.”4

In terms of the legal justification for the 2004 Policy, Marcus askspointedly whether it is plausible that in the United States, Congress wouldchoose to exclude Jews from one of its most important civil rights actswhen, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, theyhave been “the most vilified and persecuted minority in history” (29). Mar-cus believes that the answer is “no,” and provides cogent legal support forhis conclusion with a brief review of U.S. Supreme Court jurisprudence; inparticular, he discusses the 1987 cases of Shaare Tefila Congregation v.Cobb and Saint Francis College v. Al-Khazraji. In both, the court found thatbased on the intent of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, “race” could include“ethnic and ancestral groups, including Jews and Arabs, who are not under-stood today to constitute distinct racial categories.” In other words, in inter-preting racial and ethnic categories, the question is not whether Jews are adistinct racial and ethnic category in contemporary terms, but whether theybear the characteristics that the Equal Protection Clause was established toprotect from discrimination. As for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Marcusreasons that this was passed as a mechanism to enforce those rightsenshrined in 1866. Accordingly, antisemitic harassment may be consideredto be “racial” discrimination for the purposes of affording statutory civilrights protections, and the OCR’s decision to abandon the 2004 Policybetween 2005 and 2010 was based on a misunderstanding of the applicablelaw. The Obama administration’s October 26, 2010, Opinion Letter con-firmed the legal correctness of Marcus’s “original intent” analysis. Further,on January 3, 2012, in a case involving allegations of antisemitism on theUC Berkeley campus, a U.S. District trial judge ruled that Title VI of theCivil Rights Act of 1964 does extend its protections to Jewish students.

4. Alana Goodman, Commentary, March 15, 2011.


Marcus, however, is not content to rely on a purely legal determinationthat Jews are a “race” for the purposes of Congressional intent when itpassed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He also considers the “historically andemotionally fraught question” (13) of Jewish identity from two other per-spectives—namely, whether Jews are a “race” according to modern scien-tific notions, and whether Jews are a race as that term is properlyunderstood or used in common parlance. It is in this part of the book that hedelves most deeply into the nature of Jewish identity. In so doing, he dis-cusses several recent fields of scholarship, among them anthropology, biol-ogy, population genetic demography, race theory, including Critical JewishStudies, and cultural theory. This part of the book is highly illuminating andextends its appeal way beyond the question of legal intervention againstcampus antisemitism; it, in fact, makes Jewish Identity and Civil Rights inAmerica a must-read for anyone who has ever questioned the “dilemma ofJewish difference” (17).

Although population genetics are now providing an interesting if con-troversial insight into the question of Jewish identity, Marcus regards scien-tific approaches as ultimately unsatisfactory. Jurists therefore turn to thepublic understanding of race as the default position, and here Marcus dem-onstrates that public attitudes overwhelmingly suggest that notions of racialdistinctiveness are deeply held by Jews and non-Jews alike. While for Jewsthemselves the racially distinct self-identity appears to be merely an expres-sion of group bond, for non-Jews it informs the antisemitic animus. I wasreminded of a comment made by a member of the Cambridge UniversityAppointments Board about a Jewish undergraduate in the 1950s, when herecorded in his interview notes: “I fear an unattractive chap—if onlybecause one is instinctively drawn to feel this about the chosen race fromwhich he must surely stem. Small, sallow, raven hair and fleshy nose.”5

Marcus’s discussion of the social perception of Jews is equally fascinatingfor the fact that they have variously been perceived as black, Asian, orwhite, depending on the nature of the perceiver’s bias. This emphasizes theprecarious position that Jews have been subjected to in a culture based onthe black/white paradigm. It is useful to contrast the social perception ofJews with the scientific material presented. Marcus discusses the controver-sial research of David B. Goldstein and his team of molecular geneticistsand microbiologists at Duke University, who have discovered a genome-wide genetic signature of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry. Jews may well be abiological race after all, but their designation as an objectionable, inferiorrace is a socially constructed sentiment that is peculiar to the antisemite.

5. Stephen Aris, The Jews in Business (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).


Marcus then discusses what it means to be an antisemite. He does thisby suggesting that instead of bias victims having to prove that they aremembers of the group that Congress intended to protect, which places anunfair burden on the victim and is frequently analytically difficult as in thecase of Jews, that the courts and agencies like the OCR should take a sub-jective approach and ask whether the perpetrator of the bias is racially moti-vated. In discussing the advantages and disadvantages of this approach,Marcus offers a thorough exposition of the racial character of antisemiticconduct. Again, this is fascinating material, which highlights the extent towhich the racial character of antisemitic conduct is not always readilyapparent, especially in the context of anti-Zionism and anti-Israelism.

Finally, Marcus discusses what it means to be the victim of Jew-hatredby suggesting a novel approach to the question of whether antisemitism is“discrimination on the basis of race.” He suggests that, instead of focusingon whether Jews are a “race” or whether the perpetrators are “racist,” wecan ask whether Jewish students suffer a distinctly “racial” harm as a resultof the climate of antisemitism that exists on some university campuses. Hedraws on recent work in the fields of cultural studies, race theory, and Criti-cal Jewish Studies to explain the possible range of such harms. Theseinclude the injurious aspects of “racial formation” and “re-racialization”that occur when groups are subjected to racial stereotypes, group defama-tions, and resulting forms of racial misperception. This material is not onlyinteresting from an academic point of view but also has a strong resonancefor any reader who has experienced antisemitism, whether traditional orcontemporary. With respect to the latter and much more prevalent manifes-tation of antisemitism in today’s post-racist world, Marcus deconstructs thenew antisemitism as “a technology of dehumanization” (180). A victim ofthe new antisemitism myself, and having researched and written about it inthe context of the UK campus, I believe that this is an accurate and percep-tive characterization, which breaks new ground.

One of the most useful aspects of Marcus’s analysis is that it providesa clear and comprehensive answer to the question of whether antisemitismis “discrimination on the ground of race” for the purposes of Title VI of theCivil Rights Act of 1964. He convinces the reader that the answer is “yes,”whether one approaches the question from a legislative history perspective,a biological perspective, a public perception perspective, or a “racial harm”perspective. One has to agree with the book’s major finding that the OCRhas been “paralyzed in its ability to enforce equal opportunity by its inabil-ity to resolve a problem that is entirely conceptual: that is, the meaning ofthe phrase ‘discrimination on the ground of race’ as that term is used in aparticular statutory context and as it is applied in a particular social context”(16). By the end of the book, one has to wonder whether this paralysis was


informed, as Marcus insightfully suggests, by the unarticulated fact that“some officials may [have been] reluctant to extend civil rights protectionsto the socially and economically successful Jewish community. After all,many view civil rights as compensation for disadvantages that other Ameri-cans groups have experienced to a far greater degree” (11).

As for the practical impact of Marcus’s pioneering work, the OCRagreed to open an investigation into antisemitism at UC Santa Cruz onMarch 7, 2011, following a complaint alleging that the university has vio-lated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environ-ment on campus with respect to Jewish students. The OCR also opened aninvestigation into allegations of antisemitic harassment at Rutgers Univer-sity in December 2011. These are the first major cases to follow the newOCR antisemitism policy, and, as Marcus has noted, they will test the fed-eral government’s commitment to addressing hate and bias in federallyfunded higher education programs.

Because of doubts that it may not be properly enforced, Marcus hastaken action in an attempt to provide stability to the new antisemitism pol-icy. On May 13, 2011, he testified before the U.S. Commission on CivilRights and recommended that it urge Congress to pass legislation banningreligious harassment in federally funded education programs and activities.This would close the statutory loophole in Title VI of the Civil Rights Actof 1964. He is also engaged in important academic work to reestablish theboundary between academic freedom and political indoctrination.

In the UK, we have a clearly written statute, which unequivocallyaffords protection to Jewish students from hostile environment harassmenton campus. This is because Jews are recognized as a protected racial groupfor the purposes of affording them civil rights protections. Despite the prev-alence of the new antisemitism on several UK university campuses, how-ever, the statute has never been used to bring a lawsuit against an offendinguniversity. This is because we have no one like Ken Marcus, who is pre-pared to initiate and lead the fightback against campus antisemitism.

*Lesley D. Klaff is a senior lecturer in law at Sheffield Hallam University, whereshe researches and publishes on campus antisemitism in the UK. She is a memberof the Editorial Board of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, and serves onthe Advisory Boards of the Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemit-ism and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Law. She is also a memberof United Kingdom Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) and Scholars for Peace in the Mid-dle East (SPME) Legal Task Force.

Degradation and Dehumanization:The Limits of Toleration

Martin GilbertIn Ishmael’s House: A History of Jews in Muslim Lands

(Cornwall: Yale University Press, 2010). XXIII + 424 pp.(20 maps; 29 illustrations). £25 hard cover

Stephen Riley*

Martin Gilbert’s book is a painstaking narrative of marginalization,oppression, and, happily, diversity. The history of Jews in predominantlyMuslim countries is undoubtedly a history of fortitude in the face of crueltyand degradation. But it is also a history of solidarity between peoples, ofcultural fruition, of the ability of leaders to resist popular sentiment, and,conversely, the potential for popular sentiment to resist malign politicalopportunism. It is peppered with stories of communities and individuals thatare as different as the Mountain Jews of Daghestan (an isolated warriortribe descended from sixth-century Persian-Jewish soldiers [124])1 andDavid Ben-Gurion. The latter is quoted as saying, in 1937, that there is “noconflict of interest between the Jewish people as a whole and the Arabpeople as a whole [. . .]. We need each other. We can benefit each other”(172-3). Gilbert’s book is an explanation of why this harmony of interests is

1. Page numbers throughout refer to Gilbert’s book.

759


real—both the Jewish people and the Arab people have become victims oftyranny and violence, and both are composed of rich traditions and internaldifferences—and an explanation of why their present relationship makesthis less likely to be realized now than at any time in the last 1,400 years. Itis an excellent book, valuable to specialist and non-specialist alike. The textitself is detailed, spanning an enormous historical field. It is measured,resisting generalizations, giving no single face to Islam and many faces toJudaism. And it is readable, with Gilbert bearing his formidable learninglightly.

As I will seek to illustrate, the book is continually summoning forthcontemporary questions on the politics of identity, ideology, and force. Forinstance, a number of today’s geopolitical assumptions are invoked, anddestabilized, by the fact that “[t]he Jewish community in Libya had seennine hundred years of religious and economic freedom under Muslim rule,but was cast into danger in 1510 with the occupation of the Mediterraneanport city of Tripoli by Christians from Spain” (79). In this review, I willoutline some important themes around Jewish marginalization and the cul-tural fruits of Jewish communities in Muslim lands, and then return to thecontemporary issues and resonances found in the text.

Moshe Kahtan is quoted with a telling phrase: “When there was a lullin the persecution—bless them—they called it ‘the golden age.’ It was not agolden age. It was an age when the Jews were persecuted less” (92). A goodproportion of Gilbert’s book describes such periods of toleration, punc-tuated by persecution. While there is much that gives shades of gray to thissimple picture, the Jewish experience prior to the existence of Israel wasmore or less uniformly a life suspended between “mere” degradation andoutright dehumanization. At a doctrinal level, early Islam, like any othernew religion, was not well equipped to make sense of difference and dis-sent. And a combination of religion and politics conspired to give rise to thedhimmi status for non-Muslims, “a state of subjection and fealty [. . .]” (21).This state was a suspension of outright hostility in favor of an instrumentaltoleration: “[in Egypt] the new rulers allowed existing Jewish mint mastersto continue in their roles, minting the new Islamic coinage. Yet their deci-sion was a calculated one, since working with hot metals in the heat ofEgypt was unpleasant labour that Muslims avoided” (42). The Jews ofKhaibar have the dubious privilege of being the first to have their dhimmistatus conjoined, as became common, with the jizya poll tax. This addi-tional, punitive tax was by definition a “means of discrimination and humil-iation” (22).

Jews’ marginal and exploited status was partially codified and digni-fied as the “Covenant of Omar.” Originating around 700 CE under OmarAbd al-Azziz, the covenant formalized the status of ahl al-dhimma (People

2011] DEGRADATION AND DEHUMANIZATION 761

of the Pact) as a non-Muslim caste (31). A semblance of security and auton-omy for non-Muslims was granted on the basis of payment of the jizya tax,along with a range of additional regulations: on color of clothing, on build-ing places of worship, on choice of names, and on how (and what) animalscould be ridden (32). This imposition of the jizya was a reaction to a per-ceived internal threat to the political and social development of Islamicstates. And it was both inclusion and exclusion: difference maintainedthrough the threat of violence, a quasi-legal structure that sustained co-exis-tence for mutual (if uneven) benefit. According to Mark R. Cohen, quotedby Gilbert, Jews were given “a definite slot in Islamic society—a low rank,nevertheless” (35).

Crudely, this rank characterized most Jewish communities, in mostIslamic states, until the twentieth century, when dramatic forces reshapedthe Jewish and Islamic landscapes. In fact, even after the Second WorldWar we find, in Yemen, a revival of the worst excesses of the Covenant ofOmar, down to the obligation for Jews to ride sidesaddle on donkeys (231).Again, crudely, while a situation of toleration is a perilous one, it is not out-and-out dehumanization. And there is much that can be said about the indi-vidual opportunities, and cultural treasures, that were created in these cir-cumstances. There is, however, a very clear instrumentality underpinningthis toleration: It is the acceptance of a community until such time as theycease to be useful. So Jews made themselves useful. “Caliph al-Muqtadir,who came to the throne in 908, promulgated an edict to allow Jews andChristians to serve in two official functions: physicians and bankers. LaterCaliphs showed a similar concern for safeguarding Jewish expertise [. . .]”(37). We find, time and again, Jews welcomed as those who will accept themost undesirable jobs: “Ibn Killis served as Kafur’s [the ruler of Egypt]collector of government taxes from agricultural districts, and quicklybecame an expert in agriculture” (44).

Even utility has its limits, however. The dhimmi did not have a con-tract, social or otherwise, with the majority population or its leaders. Thewhims and idiosyncrasies of these leaders are well represented here: thedeliberate enflaming of resentful mobs; arbitrary rule and oppression fol-lowing, without warning, from periods of stability. Quoting Moshe Kahtanagain: “At the time of the Ottoman Empire the Jews’ fate depended on theGovernor’s mood and whim and the amount of corruption that he exacted”(92). At the same time, without, or in spite of, the will of leaders, localizedpockets of exploitation emerge, along with spontaneous waves of popularaggression directed at Jewish communities. Gilbert clearly distinguishesthese two forms of oppression, and demonstrates repeatedly how violence“from above” and violence “from below” were common but not cotermi-nous. Both were certainly forms of irrational violence and exploitation, but


they did not spring from common wells. This is true even in recent history.Consider, says Gilbert, the “formation of a Muslim SS Division in Bosnia,at the same time that individual Muslims in Bosnia and Albania were sav-ing Jews from deportation” (186). Gilbert’s text suggests that it is only veryrecently that something more homogenous and insidious has emerged: anideology of antisemitism shared and fueled by leaders and populace alike(293-296).

The response to oppression was sometimes conversion or pseudo-con-version. “In fact, conversion to Islam became a feature of Jewish life underMuslim rule for many generations, whether it was encouraged by Muslimrulers, forced upon dhimmi populations, or undertaken willingly” (43). Noless than Maimonides “justified this formal conversion to Islam as anacceptable alternative to torture and death under the fanatical rule of Mus-lim rulers. He advised his fellow Jews: ‘Utter the formula—of conver-sion—‘and live’ ” (56). Conversely, other communities, under less pressureor with more resources, were able to not only survive but enrich their livesand religion in these circumstances. The fruits of oppression were distinc-tive intellectual trends and innovations: “The Jews who reached the Otto-man Empire in this period [expulsion from Spain in 1492] brought a formof religious discourse, Kabbalah, which found its new and revitalised centrein the Galilee hill town of Safed” (77). Cultural and linguistic plurality wasa resource to be drawn upon: “Jewish and Muslim intellectual life remainedclosely interlinked, so that both Hebrew and Arabic were used as the lan-guages of scholarship and study” (72)—for example, “Rabbi Judah ibnQuraysh [was a] pioneer linguist, [who] advocated the usefulness of non-Hebrew languages in Jewish life, and penned a treatise that mentioned howother languages, especially Aramaic and Arabic, were essential for anunderstanding of the Hebrew Bible” (43). Illustrating the potential for adistillation of the culture, skills, and humanity of Jews within Muslim lands,Gilbert gives this example:“Rabbi Yihya ben Shalom Abyad, a [Yemini]biblical scholar, astronomer and physician, provided medical treatment toJews and Muslims alike, treating free of charge those who could not pay.He also earned his livelihood as a silversmith and goldsmith” (162).

Because of this range of characters, cultures, and responses to pres-sure, there is no single picture of Jews or Judaism drawn in Gilbert’s book.A range of Jewish identities and ideas of Judaism emerge over time andsometimes co-exist simultaneously. Jews in Morocco, Iraq, Tunisia, andelsewhere maintained distinctive cultures, and experienced very differentrelationships with Islamic states: “The varied nature of Jewish life underIslam allowed Jews to prosper in some places, while their brethren else-where suffered” (71). One repeated theme is the particular hardship facedby the Jews of Jerusalem, a “special target of all contempt.” (103). Gilbert


cites a letter by William Tanner Young to Palmerston illustrating the persis-tence of such degradation: “Brought up from infancy to look upon his civildisabilities everywhere as a mark of degradation, his heart becomes the cra-dle of fear and suspicion—he finds he is trusted by none—and thereforehimself lives without confidence in any” (107). This is only separated byone hundred years from the statement that “the life of Jews in some Muslimcountries was never better than in the 1920s. The Middle East seemed onthe verge of a new openness” (149). Moreover, if the identity of Jews insideMuslim lands is a heterogeneous one, by the same token their relationshipwith Jews outside North Africa and the Arab world is a conflicted one:“Ashkenazi Jews in Europe did not always understand the extent to which‘Oriental’ Jews had urgent needs. For them, the Jews of the Muslim worldremained an unknown element: remote, backward, provincial, evenstrange—not an integral part of the intellectual struggles and national aspi-rations of western Jews” (137). This difference in identity and cultureremained a problem for Israel itself long after its establishment (314-318).The foundation, in 1860, of the Alliance Israelite Universelle (the Alliance)provided a backbone for a more international conception of Jewish identity(as well as playing a specific role in saving Jewish lives in the latter half ofthe last century). At the same time, newer groups have lobbied for, anddefended the distinctiveness of, “Oriental” Jews (326, 328). But again thereis no simple story of Jewish or national identity here. Even after the crea-tion of Israel and the considerable heightening of danger for Jews in theIslamic world, many still strongly identify with the state and culture towhich their own personal history is inexorably tied. Zhi Yehezkeli: “I am anArab [. . .]. My language is Arabic, I’m a Jew but I’m Arabic” (320). Andthese are states to which the Jewish religion is tied. They are, after all, statesthat were themselves formed by Jewish communities predating Islamic rule.Nouri Farhi: “So we left Egypt [in 1956]. We also left our past, our history,our grandparents’ graves, our synagogues” (259).

The close relationship between the Jewish and Islamic communities ofthe states considered here—Afghanistan, Yemen, Iraq, Iran, and others—isillustrated not only through instances of instrumental toleration but also fra-ternity. In 1453, the Ottomans captured Constantinople and “the Jews ofConstantinople welcomed their liberation from the long night of Christianoverlordship; the first breach in Constantinople’s walls was made into oneof the Jewish quarters of the city” (78). This “breach in the wall” has beenechoed by many other Muslims seeking to minimize or neutralize the degra-dation of Jews. One celebrated instance of leadership is the Sultan’s decreeof 1840 decrying mistreatment of Jews (including use of the blood libel)and ending dhimmi status: “The Jewish nation [. . .] shall possess the sameadvantages and shall enjoy the same privilege as are granted to the numer-


ous other nations who submit to our authority. The Jewish nation shall beprotected and defended” (109). Later, Jews “also benefitted from similarsupport in Tunisia. The Muslim ruler, Ahmed Pasha, the Bey of Tunis,showed his contempt for Vichy’s anti-Jewish laws by granting exemptionsto several leading Jews” (181). In Syria, a different kind of pressure wasbeing applied in defense of Jewish communities: a more “discriminatingdiscrimination” in the face of officially sanctioned antisemitism: “SomeArabs, however, railed only against the activities and ideas of Zionism,feeling that it was wrong to oppose the Jews as a people” (170); and,“[a]lthough anti-Jewish sentiment rose significantly in French North Africaunder Vichy rule, there were many Muslims there who stood by andassisted their Jewish neighbours” (180). Gilbert offers a number of power-ful vignettes illustrating cross-cultural allegiances and acts of kindness. Forexample: “[When] her mother’s office boy, a Muslim, collected her fromschool, he would ‘carry me on his shoulders and face the angry crowds—yelling at them that I was his daughter’” (213). These are snapshots ofsolidarity within a shared history of oppression, and as presented here theyamount to little more than fragments in a wider narrative of internecineviolence. Within the momentum of Gilbert’s text, however, they demon-strate not only a parallel history but also an indissoluble part of a commonhistory.

Returning to the contemporary resonances and themes of the text, thecenter of gravity in the book is the statehood of Israel and its aftershocks forthose Jews still living in Muslim lands. The causal relationship between theexistence of Israel and intensified oppression of Jews outside Israel is com-plex. Gilbert avoids any single explanation of this relationship. It is partly acase of national (and military) self-perception being punctured: “The real-isation that the State of Israel might survive led to an intensification of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish feeling throughout the Arab world. There was a genu-ine disbelief and indignation at the Jews’ ability to defend themselves”(223). And, it gave leaders an opportunity to appeal to the lowest commondenominator. For instance, after the Six-Day War “[n]ew anti-Jewish mea-sures were introduced by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi” (286) involving thearrest of all Jewish men, confiscation of property, and the destruction oftwenty-one cemeteries and sixty-four synagogues. At the same time, Gilbertprovides evidence of dangerously galvanized popular sentiment followingthe creation of Israel. Jews left Iraq in 1950 “because of ‘hostility at a popu-lar level to the new State of Israel’—not due to any official Iraqi discrimi-nation or expulsion” (243). Tellingly, this does not remain for long a case ofpopular sentiment alone: “[I]n a decree reminiscent of the harshest days ofthe dhimmi status, Jews were made to carry special yellow identity cards[. . .]” (267). Straddling the political and the cultural, Zionism was per-


ceived widely as a common threat, both internal and external. Discussing apogrom in Libya, Gilbert says: “The British Report [of 1945] was also cor-rect in noting that Zionism had been the cause of the riots” (205). Whetherthis is “correct” at the level of popular perception of Zionism, or of organ-ized political opposition to Zionism, is unclear. State-sanctioned policy andpopular sentiment had, it would seem, coalesced in a single unholy alliance.Suffice it to say that virulent ideological opposition to Israel in Islamiccountries has many of the same wellsprings as European antisemistism—among other things, Nazi radio broadcasts into the Middle East (175)—andis perpetuated by common ideological tropes at the level of both nationalleadership and popular culture.

If our understanding of the relationship between Judaism, nationality,and statehood can now no longer be separated from the existence of Israeland the Holocaust, how we perceive the “toleration” afforded to Jews in thepast is similarly colored by the events of the last one hundred years. It ischilling, for example, to read of the toleration afforded by Spain in 1220,which “allowed the Jews to return to normal robes and turbans, with yellowas their distinguishing mark” (68). Equally, Gilbert’s text sensitizes us tothe horror underlying the absurd: “As part of a bizarre Libyan exercise inpublic relations, in April 2004, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the Libyanleader, said that all 30,000 Libyan Jews who had earlier fled the country‘were entitled to be compensated by the State for property confiscated’ ”(329). Gilbert adds, perhaps redundantly, “Nothing came of this.” In themost general terms, Gilbert’s book leaves the reader with a strong sense ofthe poverty of instrumental toleration where other cultures are welcome onthe basis that they can prove their obedience and economic utility. The finalword on this goes to Baghdadi exile Naim Kattan: “So many civilizationsblossomed in the country [Iraq]! The traces they left are richer and moremeaningful than all the oil wells. And I think to myself: what a waste! Acountry that cannot hold on to all its citizens!” (300).

In sum, there is much in this book that is all too familiar. Consider oneof many possible examples, Morocco in 1912: “Only two weeks after theFrench flag was flown above Fez, the local Muslims sought to wreak ven-geance against their new rulers, but, unable to challenge them militarily,they looked for a scapegoat and turned against the Jews” (133). While someof general historical threads may well be familiar, however, the quantity ofmaterial presented here does not have the numbing effect that a history ofdegradation might be expected to have. The quality of the scholarship, andthe writing, are too good for the narrative to become wearisome, and thequestions and conclusions it provokes are far from simple. Martin Gilbert’sbook is an exhaustive and powerful piece of historical research that will bea rewarding study to anyone interested in Jewish or Islamic society.


*Dr. Stephen Riley is a senior lecturer in law at Sheffield Hallam University, wherehis work centers on the legal, philosophical, and political significance of humandignity. He can be reached at [email protected]/0114 225 5749.

Assimilation and Its Discontents

Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question(Bloomsbury 2010), 312 pp. £18.99/$18

Sue Vice*

In Todd Solondz’s 2001 film Storytelling, Jewish wife and motherFern Livingston calls an acquaintance to see if she will make a donation tothe local hospital. “What it really boils down to,” Fern says in her salespitch, “is . . . what does it mean to be a Jew?” The bathetic answer to Fern’squestion, in Solondz’s acid satire on Jewish bourgeois life in the USAtoday, seems to be: to give money, and lots of it. Howard Jacobson’sBooker-prize-winning novel The Finkler Question offers a similarly sharpand funny view of current British-Jewish priorities. Indeed, so closely doesJacobson’s novel adhere to recent events that one can imagine it being reis-sued, in years to come, with the kind of footnotes that accompany suchworks as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, identifying the topical detail.

In The Finkler Question, “Finkler” is Julian Treslove’s unlovely syno-nym for “Jew,” borrowing the surname of his friend Sam Finkler. Sam is, asTreslove’s girlfriend Hephzibah has it, “arrogant, heartless, self-centred,ambitious, and convinced his intelligence makes him irresistible”—and aJew. Treslove is by profession a celebrity double who can be asked toimpersonate almost anyone because he is himself so lacking in personaldistinction. Yet Treslove also wishes to be a Finkler. He is, by his ownadmission, “the real McGoy,” a non-Jewish “Finklerphile” who is just as

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strongly attracted by the “inwrought despondency” of Jewish history as hehas been in the past by the “erotic sorrow” of his depressive lovers. Somereviewers have suggested that Jacobson’s narrative conceit in using thisaspirationally Jewish but clearly gentile central character has made The Fin-kler Question particularly acceptable to a non-Jewish readership. Thisnotion, however, seems to have backfired, if the verdict of readers whorecommended The Finkler Question to me is anything to go by. Theyobserved, quaintly, that you have to be Jewish to understand it. (I don’tagree: the popularity of Black Beauty among non-equine readers seems tobe just one of many counter-examples of fiction’s ability to place you inanother’s shoes.)

Instead, it seems to me that the figure of Treslove accomplishes twodifferent functions. First, as a naif outsider, he can “translate” Jewish lifeand language in a way that may reassure those unfamiliar with words suchas mamzer and feygele, not to mention what the ceremonial food items at aseder symbolize. I am not a fan of this kind of “translation” of “foreign”Jewish detail, even though it occurs in texts ranging from Mike Leigh’sTwo Thousand Years, the script of which features an elaborate glossary, toNaomi Alderman’s Disobedience. Rather, a dramatic context should be ableto convey meaning instead.

In any event, the second of Treslove’s fictional functions is more sig-nificant: he is an onlooker at the recent furors that have, in Jacobson’s view,beset British Jewry—or, to be more precise, in this novel London Jewry.Hephzibah revealingly wishes “she could find a reference in the Bible toGod’s covenant with English Jews, promising them St John’s Wood HighStreet.” As an onlooker, Treslove is able to act as a non-judgmental filterfor the varieties of response he sees around him to the question from Story-telling, “What does it mean to be a Jew?” These responses range from afondness for eating tongue, to enjoying a “deep-rooted, ancient knowledgeabout themselves,” and, most crucially in this novel, to Jews’ particularattitudes to Israel. The critic Bryan Cheyette has argued that British-Jewishwriters are held in thrall to a diasporic mode of thinking and writing aboutIsrael in a way that American Jewish writers are not, and The Finkler Ques-tion is no exception.

Sam Finkler is a philosopher turned television personality making pro-grams “showing how Schopenhauer could help people with their love lives,Hegel with their holiday arrangements, Wittgenstein with memorizing pinnumbers.” He sets up a pressure group named ASHamed Jews in order toprotest against Israeli actions against Palestinians in the West Bank andGaza, and is for a while a vociferous—and fame-seeking—advocate of thiscause. Yet the novel’s plot, as much as Sam’s personality or the actualdetail of debate about the Israeli occupation, contrives to show that Sam,

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that Finkler incarnate, cannot stomach the very group he has begun. Fromthe start, its members act farcically. Merton Kugle seeks out Israeli “racistmerchandise” in shops in pursuit of his own one-man boycott, and injureshis back removing it from the shelves. The effete Liberal rabbi ReubenTuckman, who “wore expensive summer suits in all seasons and sufferedfrom a soft stuttering lisp,” produces a grotesquely lisped defense of a pro-test against an Israeli quartet at Wigmore Hall: “I love m-music as much asanyone, but I cannot allow my thoul to thoar on the back of innothentblood.” Quite quickly, the narrator tells us that Sam’s “heart was not in it,”because the pressure group’s arguments about Israel’s “disproportionate”retaliations on Gaza “could easily be shown to be nonsense when appliedelsewhere.” Finally, it is the temerity of a gentile who speaks in support ofthe ASHamed agenda that sends Sam off in the opposite direction:

By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people withviolence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them andhow they may provide for their future welfare?

Such satire is at once highly energetic and engaging, and uncomforta-ble to read for a whole host of reasons, not least its distanced and abstractview of the conflict in the Middle East—but, of course, its real subject isAnglo-Jewry. Embedded within Jacobson’s novel are fictionalized portraitsof such real-life occurrences as Miriam Margolyes’s description of herself,broadcast on Desert Island Discs, as “ashamed to be a Jew” on account ofIsraeli actions; Caryl Churchill’s anti-Israeli play Seven Jewish Children,re-named here Sons of Abraham; protests by the group Jews for BoycottingIsraeli Goods during the Jerusalem Quartet’s concert at Wigmore Hall; theefforts of Jews for Justice for Palestinians to characterize their exact stancein relation to Zionism and Judaism; and the proposed academic boycott ofIsrael. Jacqueline Rose comes off particularly badly in fictional guise asTamara Krausz, a character who is an “at once businesslike and softly femi-nine” proponent of the theory that “Sent mad in the Holocaust, not least bytheir own impotence and passivity, Jews were spilling what was left of theirbrains over the Palestinians and calling it self-defence.”

Literary critics are accustomed nowadays to agreeing with RolandBarthes that there has been a “death of author,” where the interpretation offiction as the straightforward expression of its author’s intentions is con-cerned. But it is hard to forget that Jacobson has made his views on theseevents known, and it is equally hard not to detect a matching polemicagainst them in their sometimes reductive appearance in his novel.


Yet, the saving grace of The Finkler Question is its great inventivenessand humor. We read that Sam Finkler’s wife, Tyler, converted to Judaism inorder to ensure she had Jewish children who would do better at school.Treslove likes walking down the street arm in arm with his old Czech friendLibor because it makes him also feel like “a clever little wizened old Jew”;when asked to describe what a “Jewish tea” is, Libor says it’s “like anEnglish tea, only there’s twice as much of it.” At his most successful,Jacobson represents a crowd of idiosyncratic and dissonant voices uttering arange of opinions about Jewish life in Britain today, none of which is likelyto draw the reader’s allegiance. Even Treslove, the wannabe Finkler, is onlyattracted to the kind of “avid reaching after setback and frustration” of Jew-ishness that characterizes the supporters of Tottenham Hotspur (what ashame that David Baddiel’s campaign to get Spurs fans to stop using chantsabout “Yids” began after Jacobson’s book was already out; I would verymuch have liked to see what the author could have done with that). As in somuch Jewish fiction today, anything to do with spirituality or religion itselfis shunned, or implicitly likened to some kind of suspect fundamentalism.On the other hand, Man Booker Prize winning The Finkler Question is wel-come in a literary climate where such novels as Natasha Solomons’ Mr.Rosenblum’s List: Or Friendly Guidance for the Aspiring Englishman arefeted for producing a backward-looking narrative of comic assimilation, inthis case about a Jewish man whose rejection by English golf clubs inspireshim to build his own. There is nothing modishly nostalgic about Jacobson’snovel.

*Sue Vice is Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Hermost recent books are Jack Rosenthal (2009) and Shoah (2011).

The Unfortunate British Legal System

Didi Herman’s An Unfortunate Coincidence:Jews, Jewishness and English Law

(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011).193 pp. £34.95/$70

David Fraser*

In his recent study of Anglo-Jewry, Tony Kushner argues: “Byacknowledging and accepting that all places . . . are amongst other things,‘virtually Jewish,’ we can at least start to challenge the ethnic and racialcertainties that are continuing and intensifying in the twenty-first century.”1

One of those places that has always been “virtually Jewish,” as DidiHerman reminds us in An Unfortunate Coincidence, is English law. Fromleading legal textbooks to judicial consciousness, this Jewish fact has beenignored, obfuscated, and elided—or else deployed in normatively question-able ways. The publication of An Unfortunate Coincidence means that thereality of a Jewish presence in English law, however complicated and subtleour understandings must now become, can never again be avoided. Thenarrative of English law has become more difficult to grasp, but is moreexciting and forever enriched by Herman’s masterful work.

1. Tony Kushner, Anglo-Jewry Since 1066: Place, Locality and Memory(Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009).

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Didi Herman has written a brilliant, insightful, and extremely nuancedbook, as its subtitle indicates, on “Jews, Jewishness and English law.” Inthis physically slim but intellectually jam-packed volume, she details, in acareful, contextually sensitive fashion, the twisted and often complex pathsfollowed by English courts in their various encounters with “Jews.” Heranalysis highlights, underlines, and deconstructs the ways in which thecases she studies, in a variety of fields—from trusts, to criminal law, fromfamily and child welfare cases, to anti-discrimination claims—have created,defined, and often essentialized Jews and Jewishness throughout the twenti-eth century and into our current epoch. Herman also elucidates the mirrorimages of such emplotments and their key place in English law: For everyJew, there is a Christian; for each foreign Jew, there is England andEnglishness; and for every uncomprehending “foreign” Jewish party to acase, there is the certainty and the civilization of English law. This relation-ship is constructed not only just, or even primarily, through express andexplicit pronouncements, but also by a complex semiotics of legal discoursethat this work unmasks in a painstakingly elaborated and sensitive fashion.

Herman gives voice to the unspoken normativities of these “Jewish”cases and in doing so opens up English law to exciting analytical possibili-ties. The underlying strength of Herman’s study is not just to be found inthis unsilencing of previously unarticulated English legal normative struc-tures; its importance lies at least as significantly in the care with which sheconducts her own deconstructive readings. Judicial decisions are notpresented as an unremitting, one-dimensional construction of Jews and Jew-ishness but are periodized and distinguished. Subtle changes are detectedand in turn subjected to careful scrutiny in the search for potential continu-ities and ruptures. This is a multidimensional and intellectually rigorousstudy of a complex and evolving socio-legal phenomenon by a scholar whohas no fear of complexity and the messy indeterminacies of social and legallife.

Herman’s goal is an analysis of English case law. She is aware of thedifficult sociological, political, and historical contexts in which these caseshave been decided and of the vast literature dealing with cognate areas ofinterest, but she insists on offering a socio-legal reading of legal texts. Eachinstance is dealt with in the context of how courts have articulated andcreated “Jews and Jewishness,” without resorting to rhetorical, facile, ormisplaced assertions about what some might see as crude judicial antisemit-ism. Likewise, while she addresses, for example, the ways in which theterm “Holocaust” has been invoked in English case law (chapter 5), she

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does not offer an analysis of Nazi law, nor does she seek to explore continu-ities within law more broadly considered.2

Nonetheless, I believe an important aspect of Nazi law can illustratethe strength and depth of Herman’s analysis generally and more broadlythan a literal study of her own focus might allow. It also highlights a keyinsight from her work about the legal incoherence of the most recentattempt in English law to engage in a rigid, decontextualized, taxonomicalemplotment of Jews and Jewishness.

Drawing on Herman’s innovative reading (chapters 6 and 7) of theSupreme Court and the lower courts in the Jewish Free Schools (JFS) case,I want to highlight and re-emphasize the underlying assumptions and con-fused (and confusing) thinking that have always informed the position of“the Jews” in English legal discourse.3 More particularly, the conflictedconstructions of Jews and Jewishness within the categories of race andethnicity on the one hand, and religion on the other, within Nazi discourseand practice underline and broaden the applicability of some of Herman’scentral modes of argument. Judicially, Jews have been compared and con-trasted variously and often unfavorably with Christians on the one hand andEngland and the English on the other, often in a confused amalgam of thetwo categories of religion and national identity. Herman highlights andunmasks the normative paradigms and incoherence behind these characteri-zations and classifications within English legal discourse. She also estab-lishes, beyond reasonable doubt, that there has never been a careful andspecific consideration within English legal discourse of the place of Jewswithin current anti-discrimination law categories (chapters 6 and 7). Wefind assertion and assumption, but there has never been analysis, study, orargument about how the limited and self-referential taxonomies of anti-dis-crimination law should be applied to the sociological complexities of “Jewsand Jewishness.” The collision in JFS between “religion” and “race” wasand is the culmination for Herman of this failure to articulate a careful andconsidered legal discussion of the complexities and nuances of Jews andJewishness in English life.

What emerges from Herman’s thoughtful, contextualized situating ofEnglish law and its confrontations with Jews and Jewishness generally, andfrom her demolition of the reasoning in the JFS case in particular, are clearconceptual similarities, continuities, and connections between Nazi legal

2. David M. Seymour, Law, Antisemitism and the Holocaust (New York andOxford: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007).

3. R (on the application of E) (Respondent) v. Governing Body of JFS and theAdmissions Appeal Panel of JFS (Appellants) and others. UKSC 15 (December 16,2009).


practice under the Nuremberg laws and the categorical confusions ofEnglish law.

I am suggesting that what Herman unmasks in English law and thenormative, taxonomical legal structures of the Nuremberg Law regimeshare a common theme of factual, classificatory, and thence normativeambiguity common to the European and English legal traditions. Both areinstances of legal systems attempting to define “Jews” though a juridifiedpractice of externally characterizing “their” essential characteristics. Bothsystems share a factual and juridical point of departure that there are one-dimensional “Jews” who exist simply as a scientific and legal fact in theworld. Both seek to place these existing “Jews” into the most appropriateand relevant legal category, a category that has historically been either not“Aryan” or not “English.” Both such systems should and do logicallyfounder on the rocks of epistemological, sociological, historical, and legaluncertainty.

But because they are legal systems, they cannot, by their very nature,recognize the fact of this positivistic failure, which goes to the heart of thetwo normatively vital socio-legal values, Aryanness and Englishness, atstake in each instance. In essence, precisely the same process of judicialclassification is at work in these apparently different contexts. The shiftingand sliding normative distinctions between oversimplified understandingsof the “religion” and “race or ethnicity” evident in both the Nazi and UnitedKingdom legal systems do nothing to clarify the taxonomical, sociological,political, and juridical dilemmas that undermine the troubling and troubledexercise of confronting “Jews and Jewishness” so clearly set out byHerman.

For the Nazis, the elimination of the “Jew” from the body of thenation, to preserve the Volksgemeinschaft, was the central concern of theracial state.4

The structure of the Nuremberg Laws was created to permit the identi-fication of these “Jews” so that, once placed in the proper category, theycould be efficiently removed. The legal structure of United Kingdom anti-discrimination law at stake in the JFS apparently has the opposite normativegoals and objectives. It aims to eliminate racial discrimination from Britishsociety, but it can do this only by first identifying the categories of personslikely to be the victims/subjects of such discrimination. Thus, the legislationestablishes prohibitions in relation to acts aimed, directly or indirectly, atgroups that can be identified as racial or ethnic, while at the same timeseeking to eliminate acts based on the same identifications. Both systems of

4. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).


judicial classification must necessarily share a methodology behind whichnormative assumptions about the undifferentiated group under examinationare hidden. Unmasking these facile and unsophisticated normative assump-tions is the task at the heart of Herman’s book.

Let me turn first and briefly to the Nazi legal world in order to tracethe epistemological or at least taxonomical continuities on the road fromNuremberg to London, a path that twists its way, bizarrely, through NewZealand via National Socialism. The Nazis came to power in a worldinformed historically by religious antisemitism, but they brought to theirlegislative process the worldview that was clearly centered in the ideal ofthe Master Race, in terms of “racial science”: Jews were racially inferior,posing a biological threat to the body politic by their very presence. Despitethe self-defined clarity of the Nazi vision when it came to the proper racialhierarchy and the task at hand in ensuring the propagation and safeguardingof their Aryan nation, their legal vision was always clouded by the prag-matic difficulties associated with presenting a normative system of race thatwas both coherent (a task that was then, as now, impossible) and translat-able into enforceable legal norms. All these difficulties occurred in a real-world situation in which, practically speaking, most actors, despite theiradherence to the Nazi worldview, to a greater or lesser extent still saw“Jews” in religious terms.

The legal definitional system of Nazi anti-Jewish racism that operatedunder the Nuremberg Laws was as a consequence a confused conflation ofrace and religion. Article 5 of the First Supplementary Decree to theNuremberg Laws offered the lasting and operative legal definition of thelegal subject, the “Jew” who would be targeted henceforth for exclusion andthen for eradication, in the terms that fused religious practice and race. Mis-chlinge, those who had two Jewish grandparents, became Jews if theybelonged to a Jewish religious community. The “racial” status of the threeJewish grandparents required under section 1 (as well as those ancestorsand spouses, and so on, described in the other sections) was to be deter-mined essentially by reference to their membership in a Jewish religiouscommunity. An extensive bureaucratic apparatus to determine the geneal-ogy of included specialized administrative sections and was supported byrecords obtained from Protestant and Catholic churches. A new privateindustry in racial genealogical research was created as individuals sought toqualify as Aryans, which in practice meant being defined as “non-Jews.”5

In fact, most of the proof offered by candidates in search of an Aryan certif-icate related to the issue of “showing that none of the ancestors of specified

5. Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, andthe Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007).


degree had been part of a Jewish religious community.”6 Ehrenreich detailsthe ways in which contradictory attitudes about “racial Jews” and “religiousJews” were central to the Nazi state enterprise of identifying Jews and non-Jews alike.7

This brief outline in the circumstances must be sufficient to demon-strate the Nazis’ taxonomical conflation between race or ethnicity today,and religion in relation to “Jews.” The most anti-Jewish state apparatus inhistory could not, in the juridified process of identification for exclusionand ultimately extermination, completely apply purely “racial” criteria, asthey themselves understood them, to the question of Jewish identity.

In twenty-first-century England, the same classification question arosein the JFS and the same impossibilities confronted law’s drive for certainty.The sociological, theological, and historical complexity of Jewish identityconfronted the legal drive to simplicity and uniformity; Jews must be eithera religious or an ethnic group.8 An Unfortunate Coincidence highlights thenormative impossibility of such a taxonomical exercise. Herman details thejudicial construction of Jews and Jewishness in which the contingency ofidentity, whether racial/ethnic or religious, confronts the judicial drive tocertainty.

The constructive element of English law demands that this contin-gency be combatted through the precise and ultimately reductive process ofadjudication. Nowhere are these tensions and contradictions clearer than inthe decision of the Supreme Court in JFS. Identities need to be fixed so thatthe overarching taxonomical structures of anti-discrimination law, of ethnicgroups and religion, can be affixed. The key case for an understanding ofthe construction of race in anti-discrimination law and the consequences ofthat construction, as Herman highlights, is the decision of the House ofLords in Mandla (Sewa Singh) v. Dowell Lee et al.9 Mandla, a case wherethere were no Jews, has been used to construct Jews as an ethnic group.Lord Fraser famously concluded that among the essential and non-essentialcharacteristics of an identifiable ethnic group in English anti-discriminationlaw were “family and social customs and manners, often but not necessarilyassociated with religious observance,” and “a common religion differentfrom that of neighboring groups or from the general community surround-ing it.”10 Lord Fraser also clearly stated that his definition would, because it

6. Ehrenreich, Ancestral Proof, 63.7. Ehrenreich, Ancestral Proof, 108-20.8. P. Y. Medding, “Segmented Ethnicity and the New Jewish Politics,” Studies

in Contemporary Jewry 3 (Oxford University Press, 1987), 26-48.9. Mandla (Sewa Singh) v. Dowell Lee et al., A.C. 54 (1983).

10. Mandla, 562.


distinguishes “race” in the narrow sense from the broader terminology ofethnicity, clearly include converts and exclude apostates.11 One might mostobviously question Lord Fraser’s statement on this particular issue, as Her-man points out, of some moment in the JFS. It can be argued that the con-cepts “conversion” and “apostasy” carry with them, in their ordinarymeaning, elements of religion and theology much more naturally than anyunderstanding we might intuitively associate with ethnicity. How does one“convert” from an Italian ethnic identity, for example? What exactly doesan individual have to do to become a German “apostate” (assuming “Ger-man” to be an ethnic identity)? Herman delineates the bizarre nature ofmany of the assertions by the various members of the Supreme Court in theJFS about ethnicity in this problematic context, and we are in her debt forthe clarity and unflinching nature of her demonstration of the patent absurd-ity of some judicial statements and assumptions in that case.

More significantly, as Herman’s detailed reading of English anti-dis-crimination law amply demonstrates, we need to understand the evolutionof the ethnic/religion nexus in English law from a realistic, socio-legal per-spective. The reasoning in Mandla is not beyond the realm of a legal irony.The House of Lords in Mandla relied to a great extent on the decision of theNew Zealand courts in King-Ansell v. The Police,12 in which, as Hermanhighlights, “Jews” were constructed as an ethnic group largely on the basisof expert testimony from an anthropologist whose professional life hadbeen spent studying Pacific Islander cultures (144-45). King-Ansellinvolved the prosecution under the New Zealand Race Relations Act of aleading figure in the miniscule National Socialist Party of New Zealand forthe distribution of antisemitic pamphlets. The accused raised a somewhatsurprising defense for a self-avowed Nazi. He claimed that the pamphlettargeted Jews as a religious group and not as a race. Therefore, he asserted,the legislation, which like that in the United Kingdom at the time of Mandladid not protect religion, did not apply to his actions.

King-Ansell and its destiny as the post-Mandla source of the unexam-ined basis for the legal assertion that Jews constitute for English law anethnic group underline the ways in which apparently fixed legal categoriesare in fact socially, historically, and temporally constructed within the judi-cial realm. As Herman amply demonstrates in chapter 6, there is no bindinglegal authority, pre-JFS, that Jews constitute an ethnic group. In the best-known authority on Jews as an ethnic group, Seide v. Gillette Industries, wefind consensus and not legal argument:

11. Mandla, 562.12. King-Ansell v. The Police, 2 N.Z.L.R. 53 (1979),


Both sides accept and the Tribunal accepted that “Jewish” could meanthat one was a member of a race or a particular origin as well as being amember of a particular religious faith. The Tribunal, on that basis, foundthat what happened here was not because Mr. Seide was of the Jewish faithbut because he was of the Jewish race or of Jewish ethnic origin.13

The history of the encounters between English law and Jews and Jew-ishness, as set out by Herman in a detailed and carefully articulated fashion,comes to a head in the JFS. The Court invokes paradigms of an open andwelcoming Christianity to be juxtaposed with the closed and “racial” char-acter of Jewish religious law. An idea of blood within Judaism is deployedby the Court in a manner that reflects an apparently un-English Jewishobsession with race. A literalist, Protestant-tinged reading of Jewish law onthe question of matrilineal descent is imposed by the Court instead of amore subtle, contextually aware interpretive strategy, such as that invokedby Herman throughout her insightful text, that might have led to the conclu-sion that “Jewish blood” must always be understood as physical and vis-ceral on the one hand and symbolic and metaphorical on the other.14

It comes as no surprise to the reader of An Unfortunate Coincidencethat such subtlety is as lacking in the JFS as it is in other areas of Englishlaw studied by Herman. Tropes and normative structures of orientalizing,racialized, and Christianizing discourses have always informed judicial con-frontations with Jews and Jewishness. The circumstances in which thesecomplementary normativities have been deployed have been varied andchanging throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries. Theuses to which these different norms are put are not univocal. They do, how-ever, follow a trajectory that occurs within dominant paradigms of race,religion, and ethnicity where white Christian Englishness is uninterrogatedand serves as the template into which all else must fit or, more usually,from which “the Jew” is to be excluded.

An Unfortunate Coincidence offers nuanced ways of reading complex-ities of race, ethnicity, and religion in a socio-legal context informed bysubtlety and indeterminacy. Didi Herman establishes a new hermeneuticframework for the study of race, religion, and ethnicity within a legal sys-tem that remains unquestionably “English.”

13. Seide v. Gillette Industries, I.R.L.R. 427, 434 (1980).14. Mitchell B. Hart, “ ‘Jewish Blood’: An Introduction,” in Jewish Blood:

Reality and Metaphor in History, Religion, and Culture, ed. Mitchell B. Hart(Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2009), 1-13, at 3.


*David Fraser teaches law at University of Nottingham, University Park, Notting-ham NG7 2RD, England, [email protected]. Permission to reprintgranted from the original Blackwell Journal of Law and Society by the author andJohn Wiley and Sons.

Some Blood, and a Lot More Ink

Darren O’Brien’s The Pinnacle of Hatred:The Blood Libel and the Jews

(Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2011). 468 pp. £33.50

Anthony Bale*

The “blood libel,” according to which Jews use Christian blood in theirrites, has been responsible for the spilling of some Jewish blood and a lotmore ink. What more needs to be added to the historical account and therich scholarly debate surrounding this allegation, which has appeared, errat-ically, in many forms over the last millennium?

Darren O’Brien’s recent volume, published by the Vidal SassoonInternational Center for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew Univer-sity of Jerusalem, is really two books in one. The first half is an energeticand sincere but rather swift overview of the blood libel in Christian culture,starting with Julius Streicher’s revival of the blood libel in Nazi propa-ganda, especially Der Stuermer. The second half of the book is a collectionof dozens of the five hundred examples of the blood libel allegation col-lected by the author.

The first impression one takes from O’Brien’s book is that it tends tobludgeon the reader with a wealth of details: graphs, tables, and listsabound. In this way, O’Brien’s book is presented as a kind of indictment ofChristian culture, showing how frequently the blood libel has beenrepeated; less important to O’Brien is the analysis of individual, local, orspecific instances of the blood libel or a profound explanation of why the

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blood libel has, apparently, been such a durable fiction. This is a libel thathas had real victims—that is, the Jews who have sometimes been perse-cuted when the blood libel has been alleged; a more fitting subtitle for thisbook, however, might have been “The Blood Libel and the Christians,” forritual murder allegations, blood libels, performative pantomimes of gorycrucifixion, and highly aesthetic martyrdom are more the stuff of medievalChristian culture than of Judaism.

Throughout, O’Brien’s emphasis is on the taxonomy and repeated pat-terns of the blood libel, while he shows how the blood libel is endlesslyreplayed in Western culture (and, as an unexplored aside, apparently in“radical Islamic versions,” 268). O’Brien, a founding member of the Aus-tralian Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, allies himself with aschool of Jewish history, made popular by Robert Wistrich (himself anotherscholar associated with the Vidal Sassoon Center) that is configured aroundsubjective superlatives: “the longest hatred,” “a lethal obsession,” “the pin-nacle of hatred.” All too often, such extreme language appears in place ofcritical inquiry. Similarly, the rhetoric of angry blame appears in theauthor’s voice here; for example, “The vicious nature of the polemic isunmistakable” (83) is a proxy for sensitive interpretation or nuanced analy-sis. As such, it is no surprise that anachronistic terms are deployed through-out O’Brien’s study: “anti-Jewism” (157), never a medieval term, issuggested as a way to understand anti-heretical statutes of twelfth-centurypopes; “theo-biological motives” are suggested for the blood libel at Pforz-heim in 1267 (209); more generally, a model of “antisemitism” that startswith Streicher and works backward is unlikely to be sensitive to the ancientcontexts that engendered it. A useful and instructive history of antisemitismneeds to be more than a list, and it needs to move beyond blame and out-rage to analysis and interpretation.

The first half of O’Brien’s book is made up of pithy chapters, movingquickly through the Middle Ages. Throughout, older scholarship is largelyunquestioned, and O’Brien does not take on, or much refer to, much morerecent scholarship, such as that of Anna Abulafia, Sara Lipton, RobinMundill, Miri Rubin, Patricia Skinner, or Israel Yuval, which could havehelped him probe his examples more deeply. The second half of the bookgives English translations of a wide range of sources. These are oftenremoved from context: an egregious example is the very brief extract pro-vided from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Prioress’s Tale” (324-5). O’Brienselects three stanzas from the poem: the first mentions the prioress-narra-tor’s description of how the Jews conspired to hire a homicide to murder aChristian boy; the second stanza describes how they discarded the body in aprivy; and the third stanza refers us to Hugh of Lincoln (d. 1255), theEnglish boy-saint of ritual murder, who, as the prioress points out, was

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“slayn also/With cursed Jewes.” The problem with this approach is that itdoes not consider the context in which the story was told—that is, by afrivolous and hypocritical prioress within Chaucer’s arch and whimsicalCanterbury Tales. By excerpting only these three stanzas, O’Brien violentlyrewrites Chaucer’s story and offers almost no interpretation, here or else-where in the book, of Chaucer’s brilliantly complicated weaving of fantasyviolence and its transference onto Jews.

O’Brien’s conclusion, though written with fluency and energy, isproblematic:

The only reason the blood libel accusation has persisted against Jews isbecause Jews continue to exist. Witches, heretical Christians, and othergroups accused in the past have all but disappeared from view. The onlyscapegoat remaining on which to hang the allegation is the Jew. (264)

It may be true that a particularly narrow view of the blood libel mightbear this out. Allegations against witches and heretics were similar, butwere they the same? And were they similar at all points in history? It seemsto me that other groups—homosexuals, immigrants, pedophiles, Satanic sexabusers—are, to some extent, today represented along similar terms to thosefound in O’Brien’s dossier of allegations, but this is a similarity, not anincidence of the same thing.

It is not the historian of antisemitism’s job to judge the people of thedistant past as guilty or innocent or, in O’Brien’s terms, to “expose” the“perpetrators and perpetuators” (268): it is axiomatic that people lie andslander and do terrible things to each other, and have done so for a verylong time. What we need to explore now is how in specific times and placeslies can be taken as truths, and why sometimes such lies can be spurs to realaction. Unfortunately, O’Brien’s book seeks refuge in the general over thespecific, and, as such, misses an opportunity to say something trulythought-provoking about blood libels as fascinating instances of imagina-tive violence.

*Anthony Bale is a reader in medieval studies, director of graduate studies, andassistant dean at Birkbeck University of London. The author of several papers,chapters, and books, including Feeling Persecuted (Reaktion, 2010), he wasawarded the Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2011 for his research in medieval history.He can be contacted at [email protected].

The Oldest Hatred—On Campus

Eunice G. Pollack’s (ed.)Antisemitism on the Campus: Past and Present

(Academic Studies Press, 2011). 450 pp. $65.00

Richard L. Cravatts*

The sheltered walls of academe, one would think, might well havebeen immune from the peculiar disease of antisemitism, given how a dedi-cation to progressive thought and reasoned scholarship is, at least as com-monly proclaimed, one of the fundamental virtues of higher education. Butjust as antisemitism metastasizes randomly in all strata of society in thatconspiratorial netherworld where both reason and morality are abandoned,campuses, too, have a history of harboring their own strains of Jew-hatred,and of providing a safe haven for those who either foster or accommodateantisemitic attitudes.

That antisemitism changed in form and intent from the post-WorldWar I era, when prejudice against Jews was principally defined by attemptsby the academic mandarins to block access by Jewish students and facultyto slots in elite educational institutions, to the current day, when antipathytoward Jews is more covertly expressed in a new form of antisemitism thattargets the Jew of nations, Israel. What both instances have in common, ofcourse, is an irrational fear of and obsessive regard for the perceived short-comings, undue influence, and moral defects of Jews, and the sometimespuzzling lapses in reason that seem to characterize some university admin-istrators, entrenched faculty, and professionals in educational associations.

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In eras before the Holocaust, a strain of “polite,” somewhat invisible,antisemitism was an integral part of Western societies, and that included theinsular, clubby societies that defined elite campuses such as Harvard, forexample, where growing numbers of high-achieving, “aggressive” Jewishapplicants threatened to displace Yankee scions. A. Lawrence Lowell,Harvard’s president in the 1920s, had a peculiar animosity toward Jews andinstituted quotas by which to restrict the sheer numbers of Jewish studentsadmitted under his watch. Pressed by an influential Harvard graduate todefend his bias against Jews, Lowell told him that it was because “Jewscheat.” When the alum pointed out that students from all faiths and back-grounds cheat, too, Lowell is alleged to have replied, “Don’t change thesubject. I’m talking about Jews.” That obsession with the presumed andprojected defects of Jews is eerily similar to the obsessive, even irrational,antipathy expressed toward Israel—and, by extension, to Jews—on cam-puses in the current day, and the same poisonous stream that tainted cam-puses in the early twentieth century still flows unabated in the 21st.

That unfortunate historical phenomenon is the subject of a new collec-tion of 21 essays, Anti-Semitism on the Campus: Past and Present, editedby Eunice G. Pollack, professor of history and Jewish studies at the Univer-sity of North Texas. What becomes clear in the book’s broad coverage ofseveral generations of campus antisemitism is that the current form, the“new” antisemitism, is much more slippery, and that while overt Jew-hatredis no longer generally accepted among the Western intelligentsia, the con-flation on campus today of the many perceived ills of Zionism and Israelhas given actual antisemites a convenient cover for their otherwise unac-ceptable prejudices.

Organized into six sections, Antisemitism on Campus begins with anoverview of how campuses have dealt with, and continue to deal with andrespond to, the presence of antisemitism on campus and the frequent failureof administrators to adequately ameliorate conditions that would be morallyor emotionally oppressive to Jewish students and faculty. Andrew S. Win-ston writes a troubling piece with the title “Objectionable Traits,” examin-ing how Jews from the 1920s to the 1950s were tacitly, thoughdeterminedly, thwarted from academic training in psychology due to theirperceived inability to enter this profession because they were “covetous,criminal, dishonest . . ., ill-mannered, self-defensive . . ., and unwilling toassimilate.” Moreover, because it was believed “that Jewish interest in edu-cation merely reflected acquisitiveness,” and that the questionable moralcharacter and foreign ethnic background of Jewish students rendered themunworthy of professional standing, department chairs and faculty exhibited“a shared understanding of the dangers in admitting Jews to the sociocul-turally homogeneous professoriate.” The “polite” campus antisemites of the

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past here could conveniently justify antisemitism as a logical reaction to theperfidy and unpleasantness of Jews themselves; that is, antisemitism is thefault of Jews for their actions, just as current antisemitism is justified bypointing to the oppressive and unlawful behavior of Israel, and Jews’ com-plicity in it.

The same ethnic and cultural diversity that excluded Jews from certainschools and professions in earlier times, of course, today has elevated otherminority groups to special status on campuses. Benjamin Ginsberg of JohnsHopkins University, for instance, describes how university administratorsnow, in their zeal to make campuses inclusive, diverse, and multicultural,regularly protect the rights and sensibilities of favored campus victimgroups (African Americans, gays, Muslim students, and Latinos, forinstance), but have been either unwilling or unable to make strong moralstands when Jewish students have been emotionally, verbally, or physicallyassaulted for their actual or perceived support of Israel or opposition to thePalestinian cause.

Wellesley College’s Jerold S. Auerbach writes a more specific tale ofhis own institution, revealing how Wellesley, like many of the other elitecampuses during the early 20th century, maintained an uneasy relationshipwith its Jewish students, consigning them to dank corners of dorms, screen-ing them for traits of their “Jewishness” during the application process, andtreating them as somehow different and inferior to the children from gentilesociety who comprised the largest part of student bodies at the Ivies andsister schools. Those attitudes, and their dark legacy, persisted at Wellesleyuntil the current day, Auerbach points out, as evidenced by the college’sreaction to the incendiary writing and publishing of African-American TonyMartin, an unrepentantly antisemitic Wellesley professor who used TheSecret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, a spurious bit of scholarshippurporting that Jews were key players in the slave trade, in his teaching, andwho, after many Jews reacted to his outrageous theories, wrote his ownscreed, The Jewish Onslaught, in which he castigated a malevolent “Jewishlobby” for trying to suppress the “truths” he had attempted to reveal to hisstudents. As regularly occurs on other campuses where Jews, Zionists, orIsrael are the target of demonization, at Wellesley the administration circledits wagons around Martin under the protective shield of academic freespeech and ignored the inconvenient details of whether what he taught wastrue, scholarly, or even morally appropriate.

The thorny American topic of racism has inserted itself into discus-sions about Jews on campuses, particularly in relation to Israel and the pro-miscuous way it is referred to as an “apartheid” state by its campusdefamers. Professor Pollack, in fact, includes an essay of her own, “AfricanAmericans and the Legitimization of Antisemitism on Campus,” which


explores the troubling friction between blacks and Jews since the civilrights era; a second essay in the book also investigates the promotion ofantisemitism through the music of rap artists, although the incidence ofAfrican-American antisemitism on campus, while part of the larger attackon Israel and Zionism, has not in itself been a significant issue.

But the charge of racism also enables leftist faculty, administrators,and students to excuse the moral transgressions of the oppressed Palestini-ans, and, as an extension of that thinking, to single out Israel and Americafor particular and harsh scrutiny owing to their perceived “institutionalized”racism and greater relative power. The self-righteousness the left feels inpointing out Zionism’s essential defect of being a racist ideology insulates itfrom having to also reflect on Arab transgressions, since, as suggested byearlier antisemites—who blame Jews themselves for the fact they are dis-liked—liberals (many of them Jews themselves) can excuse their ownbetrayal of Israel by holding it fully responsible for the very hatreds itinspires.

This “unholy alliance” between the Arab world and leftists, whichmight seem initially incompatible, serves both sides well: Arab nations,who wish to deflect the pathologies of their own societies, savor being ableto assign the West’s worst appellation of “racist” to Israel, and campus lib-erals at the same time fulfill their Marxist dreams of trying to envision andhelp create what Harvard’s Ruth Wisse has called the “ideal of the egalita-rian state.”

That ideology has meant that the current occurrences of antisemitismon campus, as discussed in a series of essays at the end of this book, have tobe examined through a prism that includes the Israeli/Palestinian conflict,since on most campuses the accusation against Israel is that it is essentiallya “racist” regime—one that, as the wry Professor Edward Alexanderobserves in one of his two essays here, “Because [liberals] usually pridethemselves on the rejection of anything smacking of racism and prejudice,they must cast the Israelis themselves as the new Nazis in order to makeantisemitism, which had (so to speak) been given a bad name by the Holo-caust, again ‘respectable,’ but under the new name of anti-Zionism.”

The present-day campus is rife with anti-Zionists, of course, all ofwhom are quick to deny they harbor any antisemitic sentiment but who leapto their collective feet to virulently denounce what they perceive to beIsrael’s apartheid, racism, occupation, oppression, militarism, and Nazi-likebehavior. But those collective libels and slurs against the Jewish state areprecisely what have come to define the “new” campus antisemitism,observes Kenneth L. Marcus in his contribution in this book, “Hostile Envi-ronment: Campus Antisemitism as a Civil Rights Violation.” “As the StateDepartment observed in 2008,” Marcus writes, “a distinguishing feature of

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the new antisemitism is ‘criticism of Zionism or Israeli policy that—whether intentionally or unintentionally—has the effect of promotingprejudice against all Jews by demonizing Israel and Israelis and attributingIsrael’s perceived faults to its Jewish character.’ ” Marcus should know wellwhereof he speaks, since he and the four other contributors to the finalsection of this book, “Combatting Antisemitism”—Tammi Rossman-Benja-min, Evelyn Avery, Rachel Fish, and Alvin Rosenfeld—have all been in thetrenches in the battle against campus extremism aimed at Israel and Jews.Marcus, executive vice president and director of the Anti-Semitism Initia-tive at the Institute for Jewish and Community Research and former directorof the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, also accuses universities of usingwhat he calls “First Amendment opportunism” when they provide moralcover for extremist speech on campus with which they seemingly agree, butseek to criminalize other speech on the same campus when it is deemedhate speech by those who disagree with its point of view—its content.

UC Santa Cruz’s Rossman-Benjamin, whose essay surveys the “aca-demic deligitimization of anti-Zionism,” filed a 2009 civil rights action withthe U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, arguing thatUCSC had created a “hostile environment” for Jewish students. On hercampus, Rossman-Benjamin had observed an odious pattern of bias andradicalism against Israel and Jews, under the guise of a scholarly critique ofIsraeli policies, a process in which, she said, “Professors, academic depart-ments and residential colleges at UCSC promote and encourage anti-Israel,anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish views and behavior, much of which is based oneither misleading information or outright falsehoods.” More to the point, itwas not only the presence of this virulently anti-Israel, antisemitic speechand action that was of significance, but the fact that it was singularlydirected, unceasingly, at one group of students: Jews. And what was more,Rossman-Benjamin added, “no other . . . group on campus has been sub-jected . . . to such hostile and demonizing criticism.”

Campus antisemitism, as chronicled in Antisemitism on the Campus—both in the classic, earlier forms as a logical outgrowth of European andChristian strains, and now in its new, more covert form as purported criti-cism of Israel and Zionism—is a grim reminder that the world’s oldesthatred has not yet vanished; in fact, either because of the widespread nega-tive attitudes toward Israel, or simply due to a lingering, poisonous Jew-hatred in the Arab world and increasingly in the West as well, Jews onceagain are witness to libels, denunciation, demonization, and slurs againstJudaism, against Zionism, and against Israel itself, the Jew of nations.

The campus war against Israel, which is the most salient form of con-temporary antisemitism, is also indicative of the devolution of higher edu-cation, where scholarship has been degraded by bias and extremism on the


part of a leftist professoriate with a clear political agenda that enlists Israelas the new villain in a world yearning for social justice. University leadersand other stakeholders have been noticeably feckless in moderating thisradicalism, either because they are unaware of how whole fields of studyhave been hijacked by academic frauds and morally incoherent scholars, orbecause they sympathize with the intellectual approach of their facultiesand have become complicit with the production of pseudo-scholarship, aca-demic agitprop, and disingenuous “learning experiences” that have a one-sided, biased approach to understanding the Middle East, and particularlythe Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

That a collection of twenty-one essays was necessary to write in orderto examine campus antisemitism would be unfortunate, especially if thosearticles revealed only a troubling era in academia’s cloudy past. But, assuggested by the title of one of the book’s other essays, “New Wine in OldBottles,” the way in which Jews are marginalized, demonized, libeled,intimidated, and slandered on campus may have changed and been dressedin new clothing to obscure actual intent, but the world’s longest hatred,unfortunately, shows no sign of disappearing, along with other humanpathologies, into the dustbin of history.

*Richard L. Cravatts, PhD, is a professor of practice and director of the Master’sProgram in Communications Management at the Simmons College School of Man-agement, and the author of the forthcoming Genocidal Liberalism: The University’sJihad Against Israel and Jews.

From Russia with Hate

Leonid Livak’s The Jewish Persona inthe European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literature

(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). 498 pp. $60.

Harriet Murav*

The focus of Leonid Livak’s new volume is the image of the Jew inthe Russian literary canon. Although The Jewish Persona refers to WesternEuropean literature, specifically, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Veniceand Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past—among others—no Westernwork receives the close, detailed, and sustained readings that the authorprovides for Russian literature. Christian theology, to which Livak devoteshis first chapter, is the common basis for both the “European imagination”referred to in the title and the specific works of Russian fiction that receivelengthy discussion in the subsequent chapters. This is a book about theimage of the Jew as Other in Russian literature.

Livak’s analysis rests on a complex paradigm, or, as he puts it, a “gen-erative model” that is derived from a number of sources (1-2). The theoreti-cal point of departure weaves together Algirdas Greimas’s view of thestructure of narrative, Jungian archetypes, and Jean-Francois Lyotard’s useof the term “the jew.” Greimas, relying on the Russian formalist VladimirPropp, isolates the following key functions of narrative: the subject/ object,the sender/receiver, and the helper/opponent. Livak argues that Greimashelps reveal the basic structure of Christian narrative as one in which Jesusis the subject, sent by God to redeem humankind, who is both helped and

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hindered by “the jews” (29). Livak’s appropriation of Lyotard’s use of thelower case helps distinguish actual, historical Jews, living in a concrete timeand place, from the imaginary negative construct of “the jews,” who areliteral-minded, fleshly, parasitic, greedy, physically weak, effeminate, clan-nish, both over- and undersexed, both obsolete and hyper-modern, money-obsessed, incapable of cultural creativity, and yet also linguistically poly-glot. The first part of the book establishes the basic building blocks of theanalysis, including Christian narrative and theology, Russian and Slavicfolklore, and a brief section on the “jewish body.” Part II focuses onGogol’s “Taras Bulba,” which, as Livak argues, provides the basic templatefor the image of the Jew for Russian literature as a whole. According toLivak, the “jews” play the role of both helper and opponent in this keystory. Part III turns to the nineteenth-century liberal period, and discussesTurgenev and Chekhov in light of Gogol’s fundamental text; Part IVaddresses two twentieth-century figures, Isaac Babel and Iurii Fel’zen, theemigre writer about whom Livak also wrote in a previous work, How ItWas Done in Paris: Russian Emigre Literature and French Modernism(2003).

The argument about the “generative model” is key to the book as awhole, and it would be misleading to suggest that Livak’s approach ispurely narratological. Psychoanalysis also plays a role. The way authors usethe generative model of “the jews” depends on their “personal and profes-sional dilemmas” (164). For example, Livak maintains that the real-life fail-ure of courage Turgenev experienced during an emergency (the event tookplace in 1838) was projected onto the collective figure of “the jews” in thestory “Zhid” (Yid) that Turgenev published in 1847. This story and thesubsequent work, “Neschastnaia,” help the author resolve in fantasy formhis anxiety about Pauline Viardot’s alleged Jewish background. Livakargues that a fleeting remark Turgenev made about wanting to flog theFrench-Jewish actress Sarah Bernhardt for the “crime” of cheapening hertalent suggests a fantasy shared by liberal Russian writers who proclaimtheir pity for the suffering of the Jews of the Russian Empire, and yet wouldalso make them the target of their sadomasochistic fantasy. Livak writes:“Sadomasochistic indulgence, with the ‘jews’ as its sexualized object,becomes a compensatory mechanism for and a reflection of the violenceRussian writers inflict on their art and their beliefs when they bow to theideological and moral pressure of the liberal opinion” (221).

This characterization of Russian writers of the second half of the nine-teenth century could benefit from more historical evidence. Livak seems tobe saying that Russian writers such as Turgenev and Chekhov were actuallydeeply committed to antisemitism, but distorted their hatred of Jews underthe pressure of the dominant liberal opinion of the time. He does not, how-

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ever, offer support for the claim that liberalism controlled the press in late-19th- and early 20th-century Russia. This is the time period that brought the1881 and 1903 pogroms and a series of blood libel trials. The argumentleads to a further question: if there were no weight of liberal opinion, andtherefore no need for compensatory mechanisms, would Jews fulfill a dif-ferent role in the Russian literary imagination? Livak’s own argument sug-gests that the image of “the jews” remains a constant, even through the1920s, when Babel was writing and publishing his works. Were Soviet cul-tural politics regarding Jews the same as the prevalent liberal opinions oflate-19th-century Russia? Again, historical evidence could be useful here.

Livak’s framework consists of few invariable factors: the legacy ofChristianity, the Jews’ unchanging role in Christian narrative, and the indi-vidual writer’s psychosocial history. The problem with semiotic/archetypalmodels is that they tend to reduce both diachronic change and synchronicvariation. Figures as diverse as Gogol, Chekhov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky,and even Vasilii Rozanov, who actually argued that Jews commit ritualmurder—would all seem more or less the same when it comes to Jews.There is another limitation to this sort of approach: the Jews themselvesremain out of the discussion. This is a book about the construction andoperation of Jewish difference in Russian literature, not a book about theJews in Russia. The argument about the unchanging features of the imageof the Jew would have been strengthened, however, if readers could learn atleast the broad outlines of Russian-Jewish history and culture. If Livak hadshowed how Jews attained to the level of “subjects,” to use Greimas’s ter-minology, the ways in which they were reduced to objects would haveemerged even more starkly. This time period saw the flowering of Yiddishliterature, the rise of Zionism and the Bund, the development of the Rus-sian-Jewish press, and waves of immigration. It is impossible to ask that asingle volume cover every aspect of the topic under discussion; I wonder,however, whether the use of the archetypal paradigm leads to certain blindspots.

One example concerns Livak’s discussion of the Jewish reaction tothe civil war pogroms. He mentions that Simon Petliura was the “victim ofvigilante justice for his role in the civil war pogroms” (218). Readers mighthave been interested to know that Petliura was assassinated in Paris by aUkrainian Jew, Shlomo Shvartsbard, and that a French jury acquitted themurderer. When the historical account is limited to the generative model of“the jews,” Jews—real-life, actual individuals enmeshed in particular, andin this case rather extraordinary, historical circumstances—get left out ofthe narrative. Livak asserts that “emigre artists—Russian and Russian-Jew-ish—fail to address civil war pogroms” (294). Viktor Shklovsky wroteabout anti-Jewish violence in Sentimental Journey, published in Berlin in


1923. Russian Jewish emigres who wrote in Yiddish, of course, producednumerous works about the violence; among the key figures are PeretsMarkish and David Bergelson. Bergelson’s story “Among Immigrants,” forexample, provides a fascinating portrait of a “would-be Jewish terrorist”who planned to kill Petliura. Whether Bergelson was referring to Shvarts-bard is unclear. Livak’s discussion of Petliura’s death reveals the shortcom-ings of the exclusive focus on “the jews.”

Livak’s interpretation of Babel’s need to overcome “the jews” as partof his formation as a writer is a fascinating argument (319). His characteri-zation, however, of Babel as “a classic without a literature or a soloist with-out an orchestra” requires further discussion (364-365). Livak’s argument isthat Babel had no audience; he worked without the benefit of a “Russian-Jewish literary process” (364). Not only did Babel fly solo, he could nothave done otherwise, because there was no Russian-Jewish interpretativecommunity, and therefore no Russian-Jewish literature. The argument canbe made, however, that Babel, Shklovsky, Semen Gekht, Eduard Bagritskii,Il’ia Ilf, and others were part of the same artistic milieu and part of a largerRussian-Jewish literary process that did not end in 1940. Consider the ques-tion of Babel’s influence. Babel directly influenced Gekht, who directlyrefers to Babel in memoiristic writings and in a story published in 1963, in acycle called Dolgi serdtsa (Duties of the Heart). Gekht quotes a few linesfrom Babel’s Red Cavalry story “The Road to Brody.” Gekht’s friendshipwith Babel and his staunch defense of him were among the reasons forGekht’s incarceration in the Gulag.

The articulation of the “generative model” of “the jews” and the dis-covery of its persistence from early Christianity through Gogol,Mandelshtam, and Babel are the major contributions of this volume. TheJewish Persona in the European Imagination: A Case of Russian Literatureoffers a provocative analysis of the Russian-Jewish encounter in the 19thand early 20th centuries. It is a welcome addition to the growing field ofRussian-Jewish studies.

*Harriet Murav is professor of Slavic languages and literatures and comparativeand world literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is theauthor of Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels and the Poetics of Cultural Cri-tique (1992), Russia’s Legal Fictions (1998), Identity Theft: The Jew in ImperialRussia and the Case of Avraam Uri Kovner (2003), and Music from a SpeedingTrain: Jewish Literature in Post-Revolution Russia (2011), and is currently work-ing on a study of David Bergelson.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Caron, Vicki. “Catholic Political Mobilization and Antisemitic Violence in Fin-de-Siecle France: The Case of the Union Nationale,” Journal of Modern History81 (2009): 294-347.

Klier, John. Russia lacked the popular identification of the Jews with the Devil.John Klier, “Traditional Russian Religious Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Quarterly174 (1999): 29-34.

Revel-Neher, Elizabeth. The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1992: 107-108.

Resenting “The Jews”

Lars Rensmann and Julius H. Schoep’s (Eds.)Politics and Resentment: Antisemitism and

Counter-Cosmopolitanism in the European Union(Brill: Leiden/Boston, 2011). 504 pp. $199.00

Steven K. Baum*

According to philosopher Robert C. Solomon, resentment is oftendirected toward higher status people, with contempt reserved for those oflower status; for equals, the resentment becomes anger. The problem withdefinitions, though, is that as comprehensive as they are, they at times fallshort when it comes to application. Or maybe it’s just that Jews have thedubious distinction of being the recipients of all three forms of resentment.

Lars Rensmann (University of Michigan), along with co-editor JuliusSchoeps (University of Potsdam), have it right when they focus on resent-ment as key to understanding the nature of contemporary antisemitism. Thebook begins with a seventy-six-page introduction by both editors that iscomprehensive and thorough. It closes with Rensmann’s thirty-three-pageepilogue, giving what may be the best explanation of contemporaryantisemitism yet written. In between the first and last are analyses by someof Europe’s key authorities of a myriad of topics that do not leave thereader wanting.

First, a word about the Brill series. This is the fourteenth volume ofJewish Identities in a Changing World—Eliezer Ben-Raphael, YosefGorny, and Judit Bosker Liwerant, editors—a series of volumes that encap-

797


sulates key scholarly aspects regarding antisemitism. To my knowledge andwith kudos to Brill, I know of no other publisher willing to take chance onthis important topic.

Perhaps it is because Brill is located in Holland, and the Dutch—andfor that matter Europeans—know first hand all too well the consequencesof antisemitism. Volume 14 keeps to a European theme. It begins withEuropean comparisons with well-placed poll research from top antisemit-ism and violence scholar Werner Bergmann. The new antisemitism is verysimilar to the old, says Bergmann, and this makes sense in that it is some-thing we all suspected. The following chapters in this section, byRensmann, Andrei Markovits, and Paul Iganski with Abe Sweiry, offerexplanations on why. The reader’s appetite is whet with themes of Nazismand anti-Americanism, but what is most impressive is Rensmann’s predic-tion that the anti-globalism movement and its robber barons and banks iscreating a new generation of antisemitism. “There is evidence,” he notes,“that modernized counter-cosmopolitanism and coded, seemingly more‘legitimate’ forms of antisemitism are increasingly employed by extremeright parties . . . [and] even left wing–populist actors” (143).

The next section is dedicated to exploring Eastern European and West-ern European similarities and differences. The appeal of antisemitism to theRussians, Hungarians, and Poles, written by Stella Rock with AlexVerkhovsky, Andras Kovacs, and Ireneusz Krzeminski, is somewhat differ-ent from its Western counterpart. The Eastern European variety ofantisemitism appears more traditionally based on religious and right-wingpolitics. The Western European variety, described in chapters on France byJean-Yves Camus, the UK by CST’s Michael Whine, Italy by EmanueleOttolenghi, Germany by Sam Salzborn, Switzerland by Christina Spati, andScandinavia by Henrik Bachner, appears more social and leftist. Each oneof the nations has differences in antisemitism, but almost all authors agreethat the levels have risen enough in the past decade to merit concern.

The genius of Politics and Resentment lies in Rensmann’s focus on themodern and globally gouged Les Miserables or, as philosopher K. W.Appiah called them, the counter-cosmopolitans. Rensmann reminds us ofHorkheimer and Adorno’s (1969, 165) searing indictment of the cosmopoli-tan Jew: “No matter what the makeup of the Jews may be in reality, theirimage . . . has characteristics which must make totalitarian rule their enemy:Happiness without power, reward without work, a homeland without fron-tiers, religion without myth.” “Jew” is now a curse word for many Euro-pean young adults, and can now be understood as a bulwark—a speakingtruth to imagined Jewish power. In an increasingly alienating world,antisemitism “offers a simplistic causal explanation” (480).

2011] RESENTING “THE JEWS” 799

Alienation does offer a causal explanation, but it is not the only expla-nation. No study has been performed regarding the impact of Arab propa-ganda, Muslim militancy, traditional Christian teachings and identificationwith Palestinian disempowerment, and the role the Internet and socialmedia have in advancing non-economic sources of antisemitism. But for themost part, Larsmann and Schoeps are correct in that there is considerableresentment powering contemporary antisemitism, and such resentment isbased on social fantasy and social perceptions. Politics and Resentment islaudable for this belief and their presentation of it.

This is a large, no-fluff, bare-bones book that challenges even the mostadept researcher to not discover new lines of research and things they didn’tknow. It is a cliche, but if you were to read one scholarly book on antisemit-ism that provides readers with everything they need to know aboutantisemitism—Rensmann and Schoeps’ Politics and Resentment would bethat book.

*Steven K. Baum is an Albuquerque-based psychologist and editor of the Journalfor the Study of Antisemitism.

REFERENCES

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment.(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1969/2002).

A Conversation Worth Having?

Jonathan Sacks’ The Great Partnership:God, Science, and the Search for Meaning

(London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2011). 370 pp. £18/$27

Steven Leonard Jacobs*

Though exceedingly well written but not without problems—as TheoHobson correctly notes in his Times Literary Supplement review of October7, 2011—The Great Partnership: God, Science, and the Search for Mean-ing, by Britain’s chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, may appeal, unsurprisingly, toa limited audience—and even more so in England than in the United Statesor other English-speaking venues where the arguments of the new atheists,e.g., Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, have perhaps even morecurrency.

Sacks’ argument is simple though not simplistic: “Science is the searchfor explanation. Religion is the search for meaning” (37)—a nice rewrite ofthe older phrasing: science answers the question of how; religion the ques-tion of why. Understandably, Sacks chooses to focus on the Abrahamictraditions—Judaism primarily, Christianity secondarily, and Islam far toolittle; his arguments would have been even further strengthened by someaddress to the so-called “Eastern traditions” of Hinduism, Confucianism,Daoism, and Buddhism.

Early on—even before laying out his text’s agenda, Sacks asserts hispro-religious bias: “Science speaks with expertise about the future, religionwith the authority of the past. Science invokes the power of reason, religionthe higher power of revelation” (1; emphasis added). Pushed to conclusion,it would seem, therefore, that reason holds second position to that of revela-

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tion from the singular deity of the Jews, Christians, and Muslims and con-firmed throughout. How the aforementioned Eastern traditions would weighin on this argument might well carry the day with those that have little to nounderstanding of these traditions as well. Sacks goes on:

In the first part of the book I give an analysis I have not seen elsewhereabout why it is that people have thought religion and science are incom-patible [chapters 1-4] . . . In the second part of the book I explain whyreligion matters and what we stand to lose if we lose it [chapters 5-10]. . . In the third part of the book I confront the major challenges to faith[chapters 11-14]. (3-5)

With regard to the first section, it seems to this reviewer that onlythose with a somewhat superficial and simplistic understanding of bothvenues—those whose comprehension of scriptural texts (the Hebrew Bible,the New Testament, and the Qur’an) is literarily and literally constrained—would benefit the most from Sacks’ writing that religion and science are notmutually exclusive entities, but in truth a great partnership to the benefit ofhumankind. This then raises the question of the audience for whom Sackshas written this book: Orthodox Jews and fundamentalist Christians, someof whose own narrowness would preclude the very reading of his book? Oris it more liberal Jews and Christians, who already accept the partnershipand are thus not in need of such argument?

With regard to the second section, this time the equation is reversed:Those who perhaps could most benefit from these six chapters would bethose whose education in colleges and universities outside the very parochi-ality of their specific faith communities far too readily lets them dismiss therole and value of the various religious traditions in the long uneven marchof humanity. These, for Sacks, are individuals who too easily succumb tothe dichotomy of “either/or” rather than the unity of “and.”

With regard to the third section, part of which is particularly relevantto the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism, Sacks addresses (1) Darwin-ism, (2) evil, (3) religions behaving badly, and (4) the question of God. Thefirst and fourth are issues of debate and contention within and without relig-ious communities; the second and third bring into the conversation bothscholars of religious studies and practitioners of religion to address ques-tions of hatred, antisemitism, Holocaust, and genocide. It must be noted,however, that the question of evil remains a tortuous one for persons offaith as well as some philosophers; as Hobson notes, Sacks does not addressthat community. The reality is that the bad behaviors of various religionsover the generations have supplied much of the evidence for those whowould dismiss them out of hand.

2011] A CONVERSATION WORTH HAVING? 803

In Chapter 12, “The Problem of Evil,” Sacks begins his discussion bysuggesting that there have been historically three responses: (1) “This life isnot all there is. There is another world, after death. There is heaven. Thereis peace and eternal life” (237); (2) “We suffer so that we can grow. Otherssuffer so that we can practice charity or kindness. The bad in our lives is aninvitation to the good” (238); (3) “There is evil, therefore there is no God.There is no justice, therefore there is no judge. The world is as it is” (239).Arguing most Judaically, Sacks finds little merit in the first two positions,and categorically rejects the third: “If we give up belief in the God of jus-tice, we relinquish belief in the objective reality and categorical imperativeof justice also” (240). Not surprisingly, he turns to the greatest figure in allof Jewish intellectual history—Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon), whoposited three kinds of evil:

First is the evil that follows from the fact that we are physical beings in aphysical world [e.g., tsunamis, earthquakes] . . . The second kind of evilis that which humans commit against other humans. The third—by far thelargest, says Maimonides—is the evil we commit against ourselves . . .These last two evils exist because of human free will . . . So evil existsbecause we exist as free beings in a physical world with all the accidentsof matter and the pain of mortality. (244-245)

In so writing and agreeing, Sacks has resolved the historical andrabbinic debate of divine omniscience and free will in favor of free will. Inso doing, he does not, however, take up the further question that, by exten-sion, there must of necessity be a realm where the Divine exercises no con-trols and has no foreknowledge, a realm where human beings are free topractice their evil craft to their own satisfaction, and a realm where justice,while attributed to God, remains a human construction to guarantee thesafety and survival of human communities. Such arguments as Sachspresents them will appeal to those already religiously committed, but areones that will find little to no relevance and resonance to others.

In Chapter 13, “When Religion Goes Wrong,” Sacks presents fiveresponses: (1) that which he calls “hard texts”—the literal sacred words asthey are presented to their appropriate communities of faith in their holytexts (Hebrew Bible/Torah, New Testament, Qur’an)—must be subjected toan interpretative critique given the ever-changing historical realities of ourworld; (2) the aforementioned dualism, which looks at the world as aneither/or experience (us versus them, God versus Satan, good versus evil,etc.) and finds no middle ground whatsoever: “There is a straight line fromdualism to demonization to dehumanization to genocide” (256); (3) “messi-anic politics”—the way of the one (e.g., Marxism, National Socialism,Communism) will solve all of the world’s problems, and all other ways are


decidedly and, by definition, inferior; (4) “the lure of power”—LordActon’s famous aphorism, “Power corrupts and absolute power corruptsabsolutely”; (5) a “single vision”— a variation of his third response andapplicable to both religious traditions and secular responses.

Add to these concepts that of the increasing secularization of the worldas Sacks sees it, which leads him to posit four further hypotheses:

First, no religion relinquishes power voluntarily. Second, the combinationof religion and power leads to international factionalism, the splitting ofthe faith into multiple strands, movements, denominations and sects.Third, at some point the adherents of a faith find themselves murderingtheir own fellow believers. Fourth, it is only this that leads the wise torealize that this cannot be the will of God. (262)

While one would find little if anything to argue against his five points,what is glaringly omitted from Sacks’ discussion is the present-day tensionwithin the State of Israel itself regarding those within the most devoutlyconservative Orthodox Jewish communities (in Hebrew, hareidim) and theso-called “settler movement,” which justifies its expansion with govern-mental support and basing itself on biblical texts and those other JewishIsraelis outside their communities, tensions that continue to encompassJewish communities worldwide. Again, the gnawing question: For whom isthis text, specifically these two chapters, written: Those who already agreewith him? Or those who would find themselves the object of his critique,and who, in all likelihood, would never read his book? One would, there-fore, be most interested in tracking reviews of The Great Partnership in notonly in Orthodox Jewish publications, both in Great Britain and abroad, butalso in fundamentalist Christian publications as well. It is, however, far tooearly to tell if this book will merit such responses.

On balance, though the book that Jonathan Sacks has produced isinteresting and well written, it is not one that will advance the conversationbetween religionists and scientists, as this reviewer presumes he intended.The omissions—the Eastern religious traditions, the discipline of philoso-phy, cursory attention to Qur’anic sources and Islamic traditions, and thedivide in the State of Israel between fundamentalist Jewish Orthodoxy andnon-Orthodoxy—detract from what could have been an important contribu-tion to the conversation and worthy of a wide reading audience. That bookremains to be written.

*Steven Leonard Jacobs is the Aaron Aronov Endowed Chair of Judaic Studies andassociate professor of religious studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa;he is also the associate editor of the Journal for the Study of Antisemitism. Contacthim at [email protected].

In the Straitjacket of Anti-Zionism

Gilbert Achcar’s The Arabs and the Holocaust(New York: Picador 2011), 286 pp. $15

Matthias Kuntzel and Colin Meade*

In almost every part of the world, since the end of the Second WorldWar, “Nazi” has been a synonym for “criminal.” Not so, however, in theArab world, where positive references to Hitler and the destruction of theJews have been an accepted part of public discourse for decades. For thisreason alone—but also in the light of the current upheavals in the region—Gilbert Achcar’s recent book, The Arabs and the Holocaust, is of greatimportance.

In the first part of his book, Achcar tackles the issue of Arab reactionsto Nazism and antisemitism, from 1933-1947. A good half of this part isdevoted to an account of the origins of the Islamist movement, described asthe “reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists,” in the Arab world.Further chapters deal with the attitude of the other political currents in exis-tence in this period: the “liberal Westernizers,” the “Marxists,” and the“Nationalists.”

In the second part, the author deals with Arab attitudes to the Jews andthe Holocaust from 1948 to the present, divided into three successiveepochs: the Nasser years (1948-67), the PLO years (1967-88), and the yearsof Islamic resistances (1988 to the present).

“A straightforward and logical structure,” the reader is likely to thinkupon opening the book with eager anticipation. Alas, the experience of

805


actually reading it is likely to confirm the verdict of two history professors,Jeffrey Herf and Stephen Howe, that “Achcar is a man at war with what hehas written in his own book”1 and “a combatant, and even victim, in such awar within his own pages.”2 Another way of putting it would be: this is abook in which an author from the political left seeks to protect the dogmasof Western anti-Zionism from the reality of Arab antisemitism.

NAZISM AND PAN-ISLAMISM

Achcar is probably the first anti-Zionist author to describe and criticizethe ideological affinity between National Socialism and pan-Islamism in the1930s and ’40s. He emphasizes “the sympathy . . . that Islamic fundamen-talists generally felt for Nazism, both in the Nazi period and later,” andconfirms what others have written before him: that the most important spiri-tual mentor of the Islamist movement was a pro-Nazi Egyptian religiousscholar, Rashid Rida.3 Rida “legitimized his sympathy for Nazism by treat-ing it as the instrument of God’s will, sweeping aside heresies and falsebeliefs, corrupt versions of Islam among them, and thus clearing a path forthe ultimate triumph of the Muhammadan revelation.”4 The rationale for theaffinity between an-Islamism and national socialism “is plain,” Achcarwrites; “the common enemy was not Britain, as is too often believed, butthe Jews.”5 Achcar then moves on to a critical examination of three ofRida’s most prominent pupils.

The first of these is Amin el-Husseini, the mufti of Jerusalem, who“espoused the Nazis’ anti-Semitic doctrine.” His position, states Achcar,“is, down to Husseini’s eulogy of the Final Solution, perfectly consistentwith Nazi anti-Semitism.”6 El-Husseini maintained this position until his

1. Jeffrey Herf, “Not in Moderation,” The New Republic, November 1, 2010.2. Stephen Howe, “The Arabs and the Holocaust,” The Independent, May 14,

2010.3. “The rather embarrassing fact is that Kuntzel’s analysis of al-Banna, Hus-

seini, the Muslim Brotherhood, Sayyid Qutb and Islamism in general runs along thesame main lines as Achcar’s own account of the Pan-Islamist reactionaries fromRashid Rida onward,” states Herf in “Not in Moderation,” in reference to MatthiasKuntzel’s Jihad and Jew-Hatred. Nazism, Islamism and the Roots of 9/11 (NewYork: Telos Press, 2007), translated by Colin Meade, http://tnr.com/print/book/review/not-in-moderation.

4. Gilbert Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Nar-ratives (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009; London: Saqi, 2010). NY,119; L, 117. Throughout these references, the first page number (NY) refers to theNew York edition and the second (L) to the London edition.

5. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 127; L, 124.6. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 156; L, 151.

2011] IN THE STRAITJACKET OF ANTI-ZIONISM 807

death in 1974. As Achcar points out, he never concealed his “enthusiasmfor Hitler” or his belief in the “Nazi notions of a world Jewish conspiracy.”7

Second comes Hassan al-Banna, founder and leader of the MuslimBrotherhood. Here Achcar informs his readers about “the convergence ofviews and the close collaboration between the Muslim Brotherhood and themufti.”8 On the one hand, the Brotherhood operated “with the mufti’s bless-ing and benefited from his popularity,” while on the other, “[the Brother-hood] supported the mufti during his lifetime, treating him as the legitimateleader of the anti-Zionist struggle.”9 Quite correctly, Achcar also notes thatthe Brotherhood’s antisemitism survived the end of the Nazi regime: “OnNovember 2, 1945, . . . Young Egypt and the Muslim Brothers organizedattacks on Jewish stores and institutions—the first of their kind.”10

The third is Iz-al-Din al-Qassam, the first Palestinian jihadist who hadties to the Saudi Wahhabites and remains to this day the idol of Hamas.Again, regarding Qassam and his supporters, Achcar points out “the anti-Semitic affinities between Wahhabi-type fundamentalism and Nazism.” Hedescribes the action by the Qassamites on April 15, 1936, that ushered inthe so-called Arab Revolt.

It was 8:30 p.m. Cars were being stopped at a barrier made of barrels on amountain road in the Nablus region. The barrier was under the surveil-lance of three armed men: one kept an eye on the road, another held thepassengers of stopped vehicles in his gun sights, and the third relievedthem of their cash. Then they asked their victims if there were English-men or Jews among them. The driver of a truck and his passenger, bothJews, were shot on the spot. Also present was a man who “proved to theband that he was German, a Hitlerite, and a Christian, swearing onHitler’s honor that he was telling the truth. The three men released him. . . ‘for Hitler’s sake’ . . . with thirty-five pounds sterling in hispockets.”11

In the second part of his book, Achcar returns to the issue of the cur-rent role of the Islamist movement: “The banners of preceding struggles, onwhich the adjectives ‘national,’ ‘popular,’ and ‘socialist’ were inscribed,have vanished almost without trace; their place has been taken by the stan-dards of Islamic fundamentalist movements. At the same time, anti-Semi-tism, in both its traditional and Islamized variants as well as its Holocaust-denying corollary, has grown spectacularly in Arab political statements and

7. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 157; L, 152.8. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 326; L, 310 fn 226.9. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 163; L, 157.

10. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 80; L, 82.11. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 136; L, 133.


Arab media.”12 He provides the specific example of the Hamas Charter:“Articles 7 and 22 in particular represent a condensed version of the Islam-ized anti-Semitic ravings cultivated by Rashid Rida, in the years just beforehis death in 1935.”13

Thus, Achcar first explains to his readers that a Nazi-like antisemitismappeared in the region well before the foundation of the State of Israel and,second, that the links between Islamism and National Socialism were notjust tactical but reflected shared beliefs, in particular invoving antisemitism.And, finally, he makes it clear that the contemporary struggle against Israelis now being led by precisely those same Islamist currents that espousedand continue to espouse a Nazi-like hatred of Jews.

For “the enemies of Philistinism, in a word all thinking and feelingpeople”14 an obvious conclusion flows from the facts Achcar provides:Israel, the Jewish state, not only has a right to exist, but also a right todefend itself against the antisemitically motivated aggression emanatingfrom the region. It is precisely here, however, that Achcar goes to “war withwhat he has written in his own book.” As if responding to an order fromsome inner Central Committee, in the second part of his book Achcar repu-diates the evidence he has himself presented in the first part of the samebook and turns to political agitation, the essential purpose of which is tojustify an anti-Zionist alliance with the antisemites and Holocaust deniers ofHezbollah and Hamas. At one level, the absurdity of the effort is laughable,but it is also shocking in its intellectual irresponsibility.

ISRAEL AS THE ENEMY

Seventy years after the Holocaust, it is extremely odd to find a pro-fessed anti-fascist such as Achcar denying the Jews of all peoples the rightto their own state. Even so, Achcar neither gives reasons for nor evenexplains the strange anti-Zionist imperative that underpins his book. Itappears to be written for a specific audience, whose assent to this impera-tive he takes for granted: that the Jewish state has no right to exist and mustbe fought. He dogmatically asserts that “Israel is the only European colonialsettler state” and “the last major burning issue of European colonialism.”15

The Jewish state, he insists, is not only “exclusively responsible for thePalestinian Catastrophe” of 1948 but “strives to destroy Muslim and Chris-

12. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 248; L, 236.13. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 250; L, 237.14. Karl Marx, “Briefe aus den “Deutsch-Franzosischen Jahrbuchern,” Marx-

Engelswerke, Bd. 1, 342.15. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 26; L, 32.


tian holy places, tries to impoverish the Palestinians and destroy their agri-culture and economy, maltreats its own Palestinian citizens, etc.”16 At thesame time, Achcar rejects the two-state solution; he takes it as self-evidentthat there should never have been a Jewish state at all. He writes thatacceptance of the 1947 UN partition plan by the Palestinians “would havebeen a dishonorable surrender,”17 and treats the half-hearted Palestiniansupporters of such a solution, such as the PLO politician Abu Iyad, either asopportunists or traitors. He thus derides the present head of the PLO, Mah-moud Abbas, as “the best Palestinian friend of Israel and the UnitedStates.”18

Of course, even a politically biased author can write a good book, aslong as he sticks to the facts. Here, however, the anti-Zionist frameworkprovides the overarching structure into which the factual material is ruth-lessly forced. Whatever does not fit is discarded. The anti-Zionist frame-work operates through a simplistic black/white model: while the Israelis aredeemed responsible for everything that goes wrong in the region, the Pales-tinians and their Islamist vanguard are merely victims, for whom Achcartirelessly seeks excuses.

EXAMPLE NO 1: ARAB ANTISEMITISM

Can anyone imagine an author from the political left criticizing Naziantisemitism primarily because it discredited and complicated the necessarystruggle against Jewish intrigues? Not us. Regretfully, we must note thatAchcar uses precisely this argument when it comes to contemporary Arabantisemitism.

Achcar criticizes Arab antisemitism not because it envisages the mur-der of Jews and renders the Middle East conflict insoluble, but because itimpedes the necessary struggle against Israel: “These anti-Semitic ravingsor mindless denials of the Holocaust, far from undermining the Israeli causeas their authors intend, in fact help Israel produce anti-Arab propaganda.”19

While in the first part of his book Achcar set himself the task ofdescribing and criticizing the historical antisemitism of the Islamists, in thesecond part, he derides those who describe and criticize contemporaryIslamist antisemitism as conscious or unconscious agents of Israel. He thuscharacterizes the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which

16. “All this, unfortunately, is literally true,” writes Achcar about this list ofcrimes drawn from his sources. See Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 248; L, 235.

17. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 142; L, 138.18. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 160, 285; L, 154, 270.19. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 182; L, 176.


documents these “ravings” as “a function of the Arab-Israeli conflict, actinglike a subdepartment of the Israeli propaganda services,” and ProfessorRobert Wistrich, possibly the world’s most renowned expert on antisemit-ism, as “another professional of the anti-Arab propaganda war.”20

Achcar does not criticize MEMRI or Professor Wistrich for any mis-translation or misinterpretation, but because Israel allegedly benefits fromtheir work. Within his mindset, this “propaganda trap” can only be avoidedby ignoring Arab antisemitism or by excusing it.

Achcar has decided in favor of excusing rather than ignoring it. Hedoes not deny the existence of ugly expressions of Arab antisemitism butinstead makes Israel responsible for them. Thus, he sees in Arab antisemit-ism “. . . fantasy-laden expressions . . . of an intense national frustration andoppression for which ‘the Jews’ of Palestine in their majority, as well asIsrael, the ‘Jewish state’ they founded, must, in fact, be held responsible.”21

Were Achcar to examine these “expressions” more closely, however—an activity he would consider “propagandist”—he would soon see that theyare violent fantasies directed at the destruction of the Jews or Israel. Suchfantasies cannot be excused as merely a “response” to anything that may ormay not have happened in the real world.

Achcar, who only a few pages previously had been describing theNazi-influenced history of this antisemitism, now wants to hear no moretalk about possible connections between “European” and “Arab” antisemit-ism. “The most important question facing us here concerns the real weightof antisemitism in today’s Arab world,” he writes. “And this questionbrings another in its wake, which involves the very definition of antisemit-ism: How much aversion is imputable to antisemitism in the strict sense? Isthe fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of Europeanracists . . . the equivalent of the hatred felt by Arabs enraged by the occupa-tion and/or destruction of Arab lands . . .?”22

It is, of course, true that the context of Arab antisemitism is very dif-ferent from the context of Nazi antisemitism. However, this makes the simi-larity between today’s slogans, cartoons, and fantasies and those of theNazis all the more striking. But it is precisely these similarities that Achcaris determined not to see. Or perhaps is unable to see? Is it because he him-self demonizes Israel that he cannot recognize the Israel-related antisemit-

20. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 182, 213; L, 175, 204.21. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 256; L, 248.22. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 275; L, 261.


ism of contemporary Islamists? As Sigmund Freud observed, “A participantin a delusion will not of course recognize it as such.”23

Achcar even manages to find excuses for the dissemination of Hitler’stextbook for the Holocaust, the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion.“There is a qualitative difference,” he claims, “between a delusive, anti-Semitic approach that believes, or seeks to make others believe, that theleaders of the Jews or the ‘Jewish race’ are conspiring against the rest of theworld, and an equally delusive but not racist approach that seeks consola-tion by mobilizing a conspiracy theory to explain Zionist successes.” Andthat’s not all: he even deplores the failure of other authors to “make thenecessary distinction between the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist reading ofthe Russian forgery.”24

Given that the Protocols constantly talks not about Zionists, but about“Jewry,” which, it claims, is seeking to take control of the world, Achcar’sattempt to defend Islamist propagators of the Protocols from the charge ofantisemitism is truly bizarre. One might just as well recommend an “anti-Zionist reading” of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, another book with a widecirculation in the Middle East, and one that has an explicitly anti-Zionistorientation: “Zionism,” wrote Hitler, “does not intend to build a Jewishstate in Palestine”; it “only wants an organizational centre for [its] interna-tional world-swindling, furnished with its own state rights.”25

The whitewashing of the Protocols serves a political agenda: Achcar isintent on protecting the reputation of Gamal Abdul Nasser and the “1950s-60s Arab nationalism, with its socialist, anti-imperialist bent.” It is, how-ever, a well-established fact—as Achcar admits—that Nasser not only hadthe Protocols distributed by agencies of the state he controlled, but alsoexplicitly recommended the Protocols to readers, claiming that “three hun-dred Zionists . . . govern the fate of the European continent.”26 Neverthe-less, Achcar hastens to Nasser’s rescue: “Nothing but ignorance is to blamehere.” For him, it is not the fact that, 15 years after the Holocaust, a world-famous head of state praised Hitler’s favorite book, but that “Nasser couldin 1958 have been so ignorant of the history of this text,” which Achcarfinds “quite simply disgraceful.”27

23. Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, Bd. IX, Fragen der Gesellschaft;Ursprunge der Religion (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer), 213.

24. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 208; L, 199.25. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Vol. 1 (Munich: Verlag Franz Eher Nachfolger,

1934), 356.26. As quoted by Achbar, The Arabs, NY, 205-206; L, 197-198.27. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 206; L, 198.


Achcar’s attempt to wave away Nasser’s antisemitism as a deficiencyin his education, a kind of “mistake,” shows how little he understands aboutantisemitism. Antisemitic-conspiracy theories are not just confused fanta-sies but guides to action, theories that materially affect state policy. “Ourwar against Israel,” declared Nasser in 1965, “is the continuation of our waragainst colonialism.” Not only does Achcar refuse to relate this policy toNasser’s promotion of the Protocols, but he even lauds this statement asdemonstrating Nasser’s “distance from Nazism” and “rejection of anti-Semitism.”28

EXAMPLE NO. 2: ARAB HOLOCAUST DENIAL

Though the title of Achcar’s book is The Arabs and the Holocaust, hedoes not deal with what Arab Holocaust deniers actually say, but insultsthose who do so. “I will let others savor the perverse satisfaction of catalog-ing . . . all the inanities about the Holocaust that have been uttered . . . in theArab world.”29

Such “inanities about the Holocaust” are, of course, really there inabundance. Achcar, however, believes they should only be described ifdoing so serves what he considers the “right” political ends. In this case, heconsiders reporting reality to be “perverse,” since it might serve the“wrong” political ends.

His fundamental concern is thus not with the issues of antisemitismand Holocaust denial as such, but with promoting the notion that Israel isresponsible for both of them; his anti-Nazism is subordinate to his anti-Zionism.

Regarding Holocaust denial, Achcr’s line of reasoning is this: heclaims that Israel has constantly attempted to overcome crises of “legiti-macy” through “the political exploitation of the memory of the Holocaust.”As evidence, he refers to 1982, when, he argues, Israel’s internationalimage suffered severe damage in the wake of the invasion of Lebanon sothat it resorted to invoking the Holocaust on a particularly massive scale inorder to revive its reputation. It was, according to Achcar, this alleged prop-aganda offensive that first provoked Holocaust denial in the Arab world:“The denial in the Arab world . . . began with the invasion of Lebanon in1982.”30

28. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 215-216; L, 205-206.29. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 181; L, 175.30. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 256; L, 243. See also the interview “Gilbert Ach-

car, Arab Attitudes to the Holocaust,” May 20, 2010, www.SocialistWorker.org.


It is true that in 1982 Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin com-pared Arafat, at that time based in Beirut, to Hitler. This discredited Begin,however, particularly in Israel itself. “Many Israelis thought that Begin’sHolocaust obsession led to the unfortunate adventure [the Lebanese war],”wrote Peter Novick, a favorite author of Achcar’s.31 This hardly amounts toan Israeli propaganda offensive.

Still more ridiculous is Achcar’s claim that Arab Holocaust denialstarted in 1982. The available documents show that Holocaust denial wasalready present in the Nazis’ Arabic broadcasts as early as 1943, whichraged against “the Jews’ cursed lies,” “the lies . . . of the Jews who aretrying to gain the sympathy of the world through their tears.”32

In May 1945, the Jerusalem-based newspaper Filastin took up thetheme: “The Jews have grossly overstated the number of their victims inEurope in order to gain the world’s support for their imagined catastrophe[the Jewish state in Israel].” In September 1945, the Egyptian newspaperAkbhar al-Yawm declared: “There was Nazi tyranny, but it did not harm theJews any more than Germans.”33 In their ground-breaking study, FromEmpathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust, Litvak and Webmango on to show that Holocaust denial has remained a part of public discoursein Egypt since that time.

Achcar, however, subordinates reality to his political belief-system. Hepresents Holocaust denial as the desperate and therefore understandablereaction of an oppressed group to the onslaught of an all-powerful Israel.“Are all forms of Holocaust denial the same?” he asks rhetorically. “Shouldsuch denial, when it comes from oppressors, not be distinguished fromdenial in the mouths of the oppressed, as the racism of ruling whites isdistinguished from that of subjugated blacks?”34

This argument encapsulates many of the problems of Achcar’s “anti-imperialist” worldview. First, Achcar seeks to bury, rather than honestlyconsider, what he clearly finds a most unwelcome thought: that the crisis ofthe Arab world may not in fact be caused by the existence and actions of anexternal “imperialism” embodied in the Jewish state of Israel, but by theprevalence of irrational ideas, and in particular of rampant antisemitism,within that world.

31. Peter Novick, Nach dem Holocaust (Munich: Deutscher Tascenbuch Verlag,2003), 215.

32. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale Uni-versity Press, 2009), 177.

33. Meir Litvak and Esther Libman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responsesto the Holocaust (London: Hurst & Company, 2009), 52.

34. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 276; L, 261.


Second, Achcar establishes a regime of double standards, under whichwords and deeds that would otherwise be outrageous become acceptablewhen said and done by the “oppressed.” Holocaust deniers—insofar as theybelong to what he considers an “oppressed group”—are thus given a moralcarte blanche. Here he is making the very same mistake for which he hadstrongly criticized the left in the first part of the book: “To abandon criticalthinking when dealing with the [alleged!—CM/MK] victims ofimperialism.”35

Third, Achcar brands the Arabs as essentially stupid people who can-not be expected to know what they are doing. He has stated in an interviewthat when Arabs deny the Holocaust, “It has nothing to do with any convic-tion. It’s just a way of people venting their anger, venting their frustration,in the only means that they feel is available to them.”36 Achcar permitshimself to do what he would never do to a French or an English counter-part: refuse to treat them as human beings responsible for their own wordsand deeds.

There is, however, more here than just another irresponsible expres-sion of unconditional solidarity with the Islamist comrades who share Ach-car’s fundamentalist criticism of Israel. Achcar’s statements express acynical attitude to the Holocaust itself. Arab Holocaust denial, he writes, “is. . . an expression of what I call the ‘anti-Zionism of the fools.’ ”37 Thisphrase recalls a dictum that is commonly attributed to the German socialistleader August Bebel, who, in 1893, described antisemitism as the “social-ism of fools”—a far-reaching mistake that was perhaps understandable 50years before the Holocaust but that cannot be acceptable 70 years after it,when we know that antisemitism is not a mere verbal excess, but a guide tomurderous action.

The very fact that Achcar dates the start of the Shoah to 1933 showsthat he has as little idea about the Holocaust as he does about the antisemit-ism that drove it. Otherwise, his claim that Zionist Jews welcome antisemit-ism is inexplicable. Achcar asserts that Israel observed the spectacular risein Arab antisemitism “with great satisfaction,” and that an Arab Holocaustdenier such as the Jordanian Dr. Ibrahim Alloush is “of course, much appre-

35. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 125; L, 123.36. “Israel’s Propaganda War: Blame the Grand Mufti.” Interview of Gilbert

Achcar by George Miller, http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2010/achcar120510p.html.

37. Gilbert Achcar, “Arabs Have a Complex Relationship with the Holocaust,”The Guardian, May 10, 2010.


ciated38 by Israeli authors and institutes.39 Here we find Achcar playing avariation on the historical-revisionist fantasy that, in the 1930s, the Zionistswelcomed the Nazis’ Jewish policies—a slander drawn from the arsenal ofthe Holocaust deniers and antisemities.40

Nonetheless, Achcar has declared in an interview with the Israeli dailyYedioth Ahronoth that “I have the necessary sensitivity to address the [Hol-ocaust] subject.”41 He feels able to assert this despite the fact that he is thefirst academic to compare the Holocaust survivors who settled in Palestineafter 1945 to the radioactive waste exported by industrialized countries tothe third world: “Certain states sought to resolve the problem of the Holo-caust survivors at the Palestinians’ cost—as some states nowadays seek torid themselves of their radioactive waste by exporting it to poor coun-tries.”42 Achcar compounds this nasty attitude to the victims and survivorsof the Holocaust by his use of his own half-hearted critique of Holocaustdenial to support his anti-Zionism: “Holocaust denial in the Arab world iswrong, misleading and damaging to the Arab and Palestinian cause.”43

Does he think that the denial of this crime has absolutely no significance forits victims?

FALSIFIED QUOTATIONS

It is really not so easy to distort the reality of Arab antisemitism to theextent necessary to make it compatible with a “progressive” anti-Zionistfront. When standard academic practices fail him, Achcar resorts to othermeans, selecting and underlining whatever supports his prejudices and leav-ing out or dismissing the importance of everything else. A random exami-nation of his use of quotations has brought to light several significantdistortions. In the first example, Achcar writes, “Arab opposition [to thePeel Commission’s partition plan of 1937—the first proposal for a two-state

38. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 2; L, 10: “I have constructed the Shoah . . . broadlyin the following pages” by “including the entire period of Jewish persecution . . .that began with Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933.”

39. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 248, 266; L, 236, 252.40. See Meir Litvak and Esther Libman, “The Alleged Nazi-Zionist Coopera-

tion,” in Meir Litvak and Esther Libman, From Empathy to Denial: ArabResponses to the Holocaust,” 243-270 (London: Hurst and Company, 2009).

41. The interview, with Eldad Beck, was published on April 27, 2010, in Yedi-oth Ahronoth. An English translation is available at http://www.zcommunications.org/the-league-against-denial-by-gilbert-achcar.

42. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 21; L, 27.43. “Arab Attitudes to the Holocaust.” Interview with Gilbert Achcar, http://

socialistworker.org/print/2010/05/20/arab-attitudes-to-the-holocaust.


solution], in both Palestine and elsewhere, was virtually unanimous. EvenRaghib al-Nashashibi . . . expressed his opposition.”44 This is sourced to astandard work that appeared in 1977, Yehoshua Porath’s The PalestinianArab National Movement, 1929-1939, 228-30.

What Porath actually wrote, however, was: “Since the winter of 1937strong rumours were afoot that partition would be recommended. At thatstage the [Nashashibis’] National Defence Party did not conceal their sup-port for the principle of partition, and they even organized meetings andused other propaganda means to win public support for this principle. Thispositive attitude prevailed also immediately upon the publication of theCommission’s report. In private, two leaders of the Party, Raghib al-Nashashibi and Ya’qub Farraj, told the HC [High Commissioner] that theywere in favour of the principle of partition.” Rather quickly, Porath contin-ues, “a volte-face took place and the National Defence Party sent an officialmemorandum to the HC, condemning partition in very strong language.Various factors had led to this. First of all strong pressure was exerted onthe Nashashibis to identify themselves with the HAC’s [High Arab Com-mittee] reaction. Threats were made on their lives, and indeed during thesummer of 1937 various moderates and Nashashibi-supporting notableswere assaulted or murdered. Secondly, they were surprised when allies orfriends of Britain, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, came out against Partition.”45

The distortion introduced by Achcar is not a minor detail, especiallygiven that he himself is a committed opponent of a two-state solution, thesubject of the quotation. He describes Palestinian opposition to the PeelCommission’s partition plan as “virtually unanimous,” but omits to mentionthat, according to his source, this “unanimity” was enforced by murder andintimidation, since at the outset his star witness, Raghib al-Nashashibi, tookprecisely the opposite position from the one Achcar presents to his readers.

In the second example: Achcar quotes Tom Segev to support his pointabout Israel’s “political exploitation of the Eichmann affair”—the Eich-mann trial of 1961: “Tom Segev offers an admirable description of the usesto which the trial was put: ‘Ben Gurion had two goals: One was to remindthe countries of the world that the Holocaust obligated them to support theonly Jewish state on earth. The second was to impress the lessons of theHolocaust on the people of Israel, especially the younger generation. . . .The trial, he said, could unmask other Nazi criminals and perhaps, also,their links with several Arab rulers.’ ”46 Here, Achcar creates the impres-

44. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 141; L, 137.45. Yehoshua Porath, the Palestinian Arab National Movement: From Riots to

Rebellion, 1929-1939, vol. 2 (London: Frank Cass, 1977), 229.46. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 211; L, 201-202.


sion that exposing the links between Arabs and the Nazis was one of BenGurion’s key “lessons of the Holocaust” and central goals of the trial.

Reference to the original, however, reveals that the three dots Achcarhas inserted distort Segev’s account of Ben Gurion’s real aim.

In the original, Segev describes Ben Gurion’s “lessons of the Holo-caust” in the missing passage thus: “In an interview with the New YorkTimes, a draft of which he apparently approved before publication, Ben-Gurion explained that the world must learn from the trial where hatred ofthe Jews had led—and then it must be made ashamed of itself. He called theextermination machine ‘a soap factory.’ He also noted that not only Ger-many was guilty—Britain’s refusal to allow Jews to immigrate to Palestinehad led to hundreds of thousands of deaths.”47

Achcar must have known what he was doing and the effect he wouldcreate by directly linking “the lessons of the Holocaust” with “several Arabrulers.” Without the claim that Israel exploits the Holocaust, his argumentthat Arab Holocaust denial is only a reaction to this abuse disintegrates.Tom Segev’s “admirable description,” however, does not support thecharge of Holocaust abuse.

Second, Achcar repeatedly attempts to show that the object of hishatred—Israel—welcomes antisemitism. “Anti-Semitism,” he writes, “is, ingeneral, Zionism’s most powerful ‘propelling force.’ ”48 This thesis, how-ever, also conflicts with Segev’s description, which emphasizes BenGurion’s opposition to antisemitism. So Achcar cuts and pastes. Third, BenGurion’s reference to the clash between Zionism and the British fits badlyinto Achcar’s notion that Israel is “the only European colonial settler state,”so out that reference goes.

Falsification of sources for propaganda purposes: is this the notion ofscholarship promoted by the London School of Oriental and African Stud-ies, where Achcar teaches?

This is not the only occasion when Achcar misuses a quotation fromSegev to demonstrate an alleged Israeli obsession with links between theNazis and the Arabs—in this case in relation to the historical role of Aminel-Husseini. “According to Tom Segev, the wall devoted to Husseini’s rela-tions with the Nazis in the Yad Vashem Holocaust History Museum in Jeru-salem leaves the impression that ‘there is much in common between theNazis’ plan to destroy the Jews and the Arabs’ enmity to Israel.’ ”49 Thisquotation comes from a 1991 text. A few pages later Achcar quotes anotherarticle by Segev, this time from September 2008—17 years later—that

47. Tom Segev, The Seventh Million (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), 327.48. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 137; L, 134.49. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 165; L, 159.


appeared in The New York Times. Here, Segev wrote the following aboutthe placement of the photo of Hitler and el-Husseini in the Yad VashemMuseum: “In recent years the photo . . . has been reduced in scale andremoved to its proper historical context (a section in the museum that dealswith volunteers from several nations who enlisted in Hitler’s WaffenSS).”50 It goes without saying that Achcar does not mention this laterremark by Segev, although he must know about it, since he quotes othermaterial from the article in which it appears. The older quotation, of course,serves his purpose much better.

ACHCAR’S SUCCESS

Despite all this, Achcar’s book has appeared in several languages andbeen widely praised. On the back of the book, we find glowing endorse-ments from Professors Avi Shlaim (University of Oxford), Michael R. Mar-rus (University of Toronto), Rashid Khalidi (Columbia University), andFrancis R. Nicosia (University of Vermont), and the author and historianPeter Novick.

Indeed, in May 2010 Achcar was invited to give a publicly sponsoredlecture at the Berlin-based Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO), at which hisbook was hailed as “ground-breaking.” ZMO director Ulrike Freitagdeclared that the book was “a factual and solid piece of research of majorsignificance.”51

In November 2010 Achar was invited to the respected Lessons andLegacies Conference on the Holocaust in Florida; the theme of his talk was“An Assessment of Holocaust Denial in the Arab World since the 1980s.”In May 2011, he spoke on the topic “Perceptions of the Eichmann Trial inthe Arab States” at a conference in Berlin organized by the United StatesHolocaust Memorial Museum’s Center of Advanced Holocaust Studies andthe Berlin-based “Topographie des Terrors” organization.

How can the success of this book and its author be explained? Leavingaside the gullibility of an academic milieu in which historical truth hasincreasingly been replaced by “narratives” and the transmission of facts bypost-modern relativism,52 this book clearly meets an urgent need: it helps a

50. Tom Segev, “Courting Hitler,” The New York Times, September 28, 2008.51. Samir Grees, “Kreig der Narrative,” July 5, 2010, www.Qantara.de.52. Achcar has explained the subtitle of his book: “I refer here to the notion of

‘narrative’ as the recitation of history as developed by post-modernism.” http://www.iiire.org/en/home-main-menu-1/15-fellows/185-gilbert-achcar-why-holocaust-denial-is-on-the-rise-in-the-arab-world.html.


particular group of academics to rationalize their own intellectual self-deception.

Declaring solidarity with movements such as Hamas and Hezbollah,despite the fact that they deny the Holocaust and base their policies onNazi-like antisemitism, exposes the left-wing anti-Zionists whom Achcarrepresents and for whom he writes not only to external criticism, but also toinner tensions. Achcar’s book is intended to enable his political allies toovercome those tensions and so ensure the smooth continuation of the anti-Israel alliance between “anti-fascists” and “anti-racists” on the one handand Islamist antisemites and Holocaust deniers on the other.

Evidently, since this alliance is essentially problematic, Achcar cannotachieve his goal of preserving it by honestly addressing reality. Instead, heattributes the problems within the alliance to external causes. We have iden-tified Achcar’s central pseudo-explanation: Israeli propaganda. He alsoresorts, however, to a second such explanation, also with far-reachingimplications: Islamophobia.

True, the author describes the “unprecedented expansion of religios-ity,” expressed in rising support among the Palestinians for movementssuch as Hamas as “a regression.”53 For anti-Zionist reasons, however, he isready to praise the local engines of that regression for their supposed evolu-tionary potential: “Thanks to the indispensable dose of pragmatism withoutwhich organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah could not have attainedtheir present size and played the roles they now play, they can learn to leavetheir Islamized anti-Semitism behind.”54

To cast doubt on this scenario, Achcar suggests, is to fall prey to the“huge increase in Islamophobia,” which he deems—in place of antisemit-ism—to be “the true European racism of our day” and which “has found ameans of large-scale ‘sublimation’ in hostility to what has come to be called‘Islamism’ or even ‘Islamofascism.’ ”55 In other words, according to Ach-car, anyone who pays overly critical attention to the “regression” embodiedin the Islamist movements is not sincerely concerned about that regression,but is merely “sublimating” racist sentiments. If one accepts this argument,it is, incidentally, hard to see why Achcar’s harsh critique of pan-Islamismin the first part of his book does not qualify as equally racist.

At the same time, Achcar wants to stifle any serious engagement withthe many new studies that throw light on the nature of Islamistically moti-vated antisemitism and its relationship with National Socialism. Evenfriendly critics have noted how aggressively and summarily he dismisses

53. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 245; L, 233.54. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 253-255; L, 242.55. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 282-283; L, 268.


these studies as a “flood of hate-filled anti-Arab and anti-Muslim texts . . .in the context of a new Islamophobia.”56

On top of being agents of Zionism, Achcar here smears critics of Arabantisemitism a second time as being motivated by “Islamophobia,” in theface of which it would be petty and sectarian for the left to break the alli-ance with the Islamists. Were anyone within his political milieu to startseriously studying and considering the implications of the work of thesecritics, they would, Achcar implies, be giving in to racist Islamophobia.

Such amalgams are rhetorically effective, but they have this disadvan-tage: in using them Achcar places himself firmly on the side of Islamistregression in the Arab world. And this at a time when uprisings are shakingthe Arab-Islamic world, from Tunis to Teheran! The driving force behindthese upheavals is not a bugbear called Israel nor a fantasized “Westernimperialism”—nor, indeed, an absence of “true Islam”—but real problemssuch as a lack of freedom and democracy, arbitrary rule, unemployment,sexual oppression, and discrimination against women. If there is to be last-ing and substantial change, however, these movements will have to take acritical look at aspects of their own societies, including rampant antisemit-ism and a fondness for conspiracy theories. This process is likely to involvecriticism of at least some aspects of Islamic tradition.

There is some hope that the revolutionary experience will strengthenthe self-awareness and sense of responsibility of individuals so that thedemand for a Jewish scapegoat recedes. On the other hand, antisemiticIslamist actors such as the Iranian regime, Hezbollah, Hamas, and theEgyptian Muslim Brotherhood are eyeing their chance. It is precisely atsuch a time—a time of change and a new beginning—that it becomes moreimportant than ever to raise the issues of the roots and potential conse-quences of Arab antisemitism and Holocaust denial in a responsible andscholarly way. Achcar’s book does not help with this urgent task. It is partof the problem.

*Matthias Kuntzel is a political scientist and author of Jihad and Jews. He residesin Hamburg. Colin Meade teaches at the Faculty of Law, London MetropolitanUniversity. Earlier this year, he left the UCU in protest of the antisemitism inherentin their anti-Zionist stance.

This essay, first published on engageonline.wordpress.com/about-engage/ Septem-ber 24, has been edited and formatted for publication in this issue of the Journal forthe Study of Antisemitism.

56. Achcar, The Arabs, NY, 168; L, 162.

Just How Mad Was He?

Delin Colon’s Rasputin and the Jews: A Reversal of History(Charleston, SC: Createspace 2011). 110 pp. $15

Israel Drazin*

Grigory Rasputin (born 1870, died 1916 by assassination) was a nearlyilliterate, highly intelligent, religious man who was philosemitic. He wasunfairly vilified by the fanatically conservative and antisemitic Russiansociety—he advocated equal rights for poverty-stricken Jews and the peas-antry, he was a pacifist, an anti-death penalty advocate, and made trips toIsrael. The distorted history portrays Rasputin as the herbalist spiritual advi-sor who hypnotized the Russian tzar Nicholas and his wife, Alexandra,forcing them to obey his wishes. In reality, the tzar frequently ignored Ras-putin’s political advice.

In Rasputin and the Jews: A Reversal of History, written by DelinColon, the great-great-niece of Rasputin’s Jewish secretary Aron Sima-novitch, the author states that Rasputin received up to 200 people a day,often taking up causes of the oppressed. He frequently prayed with his fol-lowers, offering spiritual advice without a fee. His pacifist stance (Russialost four million lives during World War I) coincided with strongly heldviews about equal rights for all people. He believed that “all religions werevaluable and were just different ways of understanding God” and opposedthe death penalty because he was convinced that many condemned peoplewere innocent.

Peter the Great spread the fear and paranoia about Jews during his rulefrom 1696 to 1725. Suffocating restrictions were placed on Jews, including

821


expulsions and pogroms—state-sponsored murders of Jewish communities,where lives were lost and property confiscated.

Rasputin criticized these practices, stating at one point, “Instead oforganizing pogroms and accusing Jews of all evils, we would do better tocriticize ourselves.” In 1910, he sided with 307 Jewish dentists and savedthem from certain death when charged with entering the profession to avoidresidence in the Pale, the segregated Jewish region. In 1913, he stood up forMendel Bellis, a Jew accused of killing Christians and using their blood forPassover matzoh. He helped Jewish children enter schools despite restric-tive quotas. Some pogroms may have been averted through his warnings—individual lives clearly were. During World War I, a Jewish doctor wasfreed from a German prison based on Rasputin’s interventions. These areonly some of the many humanitarian acts that Colon describes in her book.

Tsar Nicholas, a superstitious man, brought Rasputin into his court in1905 upon hearing of Rasputin’s reputation as a healer. Though Rasputinwent on to treat Nicholas’s hemophiliac son. the tsar dismissed Jewishequal rights, restricting vodka and the distribution of food for the poor.

When Tzar Nicholas heard that his relatives had murdered Rasputin,he said, “I am filled with shame that the hands of my kinsmen are stainedwith the blood of a simple peasant . . . He’s simply a Russian, good, relig-ious, with a simple spirit; when in pain or doubt, I like to talk with him andinvariably, I feel at peace with myself.”

Scholars have concluded that had Rasputin’s programs been adopted,the 1917 revolution may have been averted. It is tragic that a person shouldbe vilified because he sought to aid people, and it is even more heartrendingthat all too many people accepted these lies as true.

*Israel Drazin, PhD, is a retired Army brigadier general, rabbi, attorney, and theauthor of seventeen books. His Web site is http://booksnthoughts.com.

Film Reviews

John Madden’s The Debt (subtitled).Miramax 2011. In theaters and DVD. $29

Joanne Intrator and Scott Rose*

John Madden’s film The Debt, unintentionally farcical, incorporatesthemes involving antisemitism. The movie—which narrates the fictionalMossad capture of a Joseph Mengele-like war criminal—communicates noinsight into either Nazis or the Mossad. With this glitzy do-over of the 2007Israeli film The Debt, furthermore, Tinseltown conspicuously was not aim-ing for enhanced authenticity; the Israeli actors were replaced by far betterknown international ones.

The preposterousness of The Debt’s premise often is matched byabsurdities in its realization as a movie. Three Mossad agents capture theMengele figure—Dieter Vogel—in East Berlin; he later escapes throughcunning and force. Fearing that if they reported Vogel’s escape, they wouldbe disgraced in front of Israeli society, the Mossad agents agree amongthemselves to allege killing Vogel. Let us immediately blow a whistle onthis premise. When did the Israeli public ever make Mossad agents feelashamed over not having brought a Nazi to justice? Bear in mind that for-mer Mossad Chief Isser Harel’s social standing was not the least harmed

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through his admission of having missed Mengele by a hair in SouthAmerica.

After lying about killing Vogel, the three fictional Mossad agents arefrequently feted in Israel; the movie audience is given to believe that main-taining this charade is a burden frazzling to their nerves. Indeed, in TheDebt, the Mossad agents’ anxiety over eventually getting caught out in theirfabrication carries far greater weight than does whatever Vogel may feelabout his war crimes. If it were not that this film’s core concept—that of theagents’ big fib—is indispensable to the tedious structure of the thriller, youmight infer an intent to discredit Israel through the portrayal of Mossadagents deliberately lying about their history for selfish ends. Moreover, thefilm’s treatment of its premise tends toward ludicrously implying somedegree of moral equivalency between the Nazi doctor and the Mossadagents.

Yet the film in truth says nothing of political import, possibly becauseif it did, its money-making potential as an international entertainment wouldbe diminished. A sleek Hollywood production, it includes many “let’s-make-a-commercial-thriller” checklist items. Critical consensus neithercondemns the movie outright qua thriller nor lauds it as an especially finespecimen of its type. There is, be it noted, much carelessness in historicaldetail. For example, in the film, an East Berlin mail truck has “DDR Post”written on its side, but there simply was no DDR Post; the mail service thatoperated in East Berlin in the 1960s was called “Deutsche Post.” (TheWest German mail service, by contrast, was the “Deutsche Bundespost.”)You will find DDR written on some East German stamps, but never, ever“DDR Post.” Any number of similar bloopers surface in the film. Theobject here is not to nitpick for the sake of nitpicking, but rather to point outthat the inauthenticity of the film’s central concept infects many tangentialproduction details.

Particularly false notes are sounded in the scenes showing Vogel heldcaptive in an East Berlin safe house. According to the movie’s style ofreasoning, a captured and bound Nazi would taunt his Mossad guards byspewing antisemitic contempt at them—despite the evident peril to him indoing so—and they would then become so unhinged by his spewing ofantisemitic contempt that he would succeed in escaping from them, despitetheir world-class Mossad intelligence training.

The film’s makers have inaccurately imagined character as egregiouslyas Hannah Arendt did in asserting that Adolph Eichmann at his trial was theembodiment of the “banality of evil” because he seemed an average person,evidencing neither hatred nor guilt. Arendt, for whatever reason, did notconsider in her statement that Eichmann was trying to escape the deathpenalty through an “I was only following orders” defense; openly display-

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ing hatred or guilt would have undermined that attempted defense. Arendt’sconcept of the Banality of Evil remains a respectable springboard tothought, but plainly, Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem did not look and feel ashe did when architecting and carrying out the notorious Endlosung derJudenfrage.

For reasons similar to why Eichmann at trial, hoping to avoid the deathpenalty, did not state “I think all Jews must die,” a Vogel type—bound to aradiator while a Mossad agent is shaving his exposed Nazi neck with astraight razor—would not likely say, “You Jews, you don’t know how tokill. You only know how to die.” Toward the narrative’s conclusion, Vogelresurfaces in a hospital in Kiev. One of the Mossad agents commits suiciderather than to face up to his lie and a second agent has been confined to awheelchair. Thus it is left to the female agent, Rachel, to go redeem theirhonor, or something, by bringing the Nazi to justice. The way the assassina-tion is presented visually could hardly be more ridiculous. Throughout thefilm, the agents are seen alternately in the 1960s and the 1990s, with twosets of actors portraying their younger and older selves. When first webehold Vogel in his Kiev hospital room, he looks about 90, and frail. Butafter Rachel enters his room to begin her struggle with him, he is shown ashis younger, robust self, as he appeared at the time of his Mossad captivityin East Berlin. Unable to make a frail 90-year-old hospital patient fit theaction sequence of their script, those responsible for the film grasped at asupernatural, miracuously rejuvenating straw. The height of this muddlednonsense has Vogel stabbed in the back, lurching out of his room andthrough the halls like Frankenstein’s monster and then collapsing flat on hisNazi punum.

Disparate stimulating fictions have grappled meaningfully with bring-ing Nazis to justice, among them Friedrich Durrenmatt’s novel DerVerdacht (Suspicion) and Eytan Fox’s film ııeu oı aıeı (Walk on Water). Wemight now ask whether shallow, half-baked, Holocaust-themed entertain-ments like The Debt risk giving international audiences Nazi-theme fatigue,leaving them less receptive to more worthwhile and thought-provokingtreatments.


Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Sarah’s Key.Weinstein Company 2011. DVD. $29


The considerable international success of Sarah’s Key makes for agood springboard to a consideration of some of the vagaries of Holocaustremembrance.

Tatiana de Rosnay’s novel—and Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s eponymousfilm adaptation of it—treats of French complicity in the Holocaust, andspecifically, of the July 1942 roundup of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris,carried out by French police under orders from the Gestapo. Most of thevictims ultimately met their deaths in Nazi concentration camps. The starkfacts of mass murder stemming from racial profiling in a metropolitancenter long proud of its modern, liberal traditions are almost incomprehen-sible. Be that as it may, the complexity of local Parisian reactions to thoseevents rapidly became subsumed in national and international politics.

In the aftermath of World War II, the rigorous practical demands ofsocial recovery facilitated a whitewashing of recent national history,through which French identity became synonymous with resistance to theNazi occupiers, while the realities pertaining to those among the Frenchwho collaborated with the Nazis largely went undiscussed. Not until 1969,with Marcel Ophuls’ film The Sorrow and the Pity, did the society finallystart to take a more open, honest look at the Vichy period. Without specifi-


cally examining the death-camp deportations, the movie did considerantisemitism in French society of the WWII era, and famously causedyoung French people to ask their parents “What did you know?” Ironically,French politician Simone Veil, though a concentration camp survivor, ledcriticism of the movie for what she said was its overemphasis of Frenchcollaboration with the Nazis.

Little wonder, then, that so few popular French novels and films havedealt with French complicity in the Holocaust. Roger Boussinot’s memoirLes Guichets du Louvre (The Gates of the Louvre), published in France in1960, served as the basis of Michel Mitrani’s 1974 film Les Guichets duLouvre, known in English as Black Thursday. The protagonist is a Sorbonnestudent who attempts to warn individual Jews that they must hide. Themovie romanticizes the book, which, though valuable, apparently has neverbeen published in English translation. Alain Delon starred in MonsieurKlein, the Joseph Losey film of 1976. It is intriguing that this rather meta-physical movie unites the destinies of two Robert Kleins in Paris, one Jew-ish, one not, in the roundup at the Velodrome d’Hiver. A respected FrenchTV director, Maurice Frydland, made several films—little known to thenon-French world—dealing with the Occupation, among them 1992’s LesEnfants du Vel d’Hiv (The Children of the Velodrome d’Hiver).

Charles de Gaulle had set the tone of the postwar attitude towardWWII-era events in France by asserting that the Vichy government hadnever been legitimate and therefore nothing that happened under it was theresponsibility of the French Republic, which was restored after the war.This official French government line only changed on July 16, 1995, on the42nd anniversary of the beginning of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, when Presi-dent Jacques Chirac declared it was time for the state to acknowledgeFrench complicity in the Holocaust. A French national holiday marking thedate of the roundup strikes a balance by commemorating the crimes whilealso remembering the victims, along with those French of good consciencewho managed to save neighbors from abrupt tragic fates.

Rose Bosch’s La Rafle (The Round Up) of 2010, a historical dramabased entirely on real figures, provoked within France widespread discus-sion and argument about the history itself, as well as of the film qua film.Many of the persons depicted in the movie are children; touchingly, thereare anecdotes of French youngsters contacting Bosch through Facebook tosay they had no idea of that part of French history.

Tatiana de Rosnay—half French, half English, and raised largely in theUnited States—in a video interview told the Jewish Book Council what hadled to her writing Sarah’s Key. She said that as a French citizen, she knewnext to nothing about the Vel d’Hiv roundup when Chirac spoke of it in1995. Then, the more she learned about how French police had rounded up


French-Jewish children, the more horrified and disgusted she became andthe more strongly compelled she felt to base a novel on the theme.

Completed in 2002, the manuscript accumulated over twenty rejectionsfrom publishers, who deemed it too dark a work to encounter likely success.Discouraged, de Rosnay abandoned hope for the book, yet went on to writeand publish two additional novels. Rachel Dodes’s July 2011 report in TheWall Street Journal, “The Hit No One Wanted,” tells how de Rosnay finallygot Rachel’s Key published in 2007. And nearly equal difficulties wereencountered before the book could be adapted into the 2010 film directedby Paquet-Brenner. The New York Times, for instance, never even publisheda review of the novel, but in July 2009 reported on how it had been pro-pelled onto best-sellers lists through book selection and marketing programsat Target department stores.

Actress Kristin Scott Thomas’s attachment to the film magnetizedinternational attention to it. Scott Thomas plays Julia Jarmond, an Americanjournalist who once was assigned to write a magazine article about the Veld’Hiv events. Married to a Frenchman who inherits a Paris apartment fromhis grandparents, Julia reckons that her husband’s family took possession ofthe property very shortly after the Vel d’Hiv roundup. From her father-in-law, she manages to learn disturbing details of the history of the apartment,which at the time of the roundup had been inhabited by the Jewish Starzyn-ski family. The ten-year-old Sarah Starzynski, immediately prior to beingarrested, hid her younger brother Michel in a lockable cupboard, promisingshe would return to save him. However, by the time Sarah escaped from adetention camp in Beaune-la-Rolande and then returned to Paris with theassistance of a sympathetic elderly French couple, Michel had perishedinside the cupboard. Julia persists with multicontinental investigations ofSarah’s life and fate.

Both book and film alternate scenes between Occupation-era Franceand the early 21st century. While reaction to the film has generally beenvery favorable, most critics agree that the scenes involving the young Sarah,played by the prodigiously talented Melusine Mayance, are stronger thanthe contemporary scenes. Strange as it may be, Sarah, though a fictionalcharacter, has done more than the true-life characters portrayed in Bosch’sThe Round Up to call international attention to the history of the arrests ofFrench Jews by French police for deportation to Nazi extermination centers.Though some of the more exactingly intellectual critics reproach Sarah’sKey for being “sentimental,” it is probable that both the book’s and film’scapacity for making today’s young readers and viewers truly feel for Sarahwill turn them into adults with interests in Holocaust history later in theirlives.


Gloria Greenfield’s Unmasked: Judeophobia and theThreat to Civilization. Emet, 2011.

Jewish Film Festivals. DVD [email protected]


As with her previous film, The Case for Israel, Gloria Z. Greenfieldserves up essential food for thought with Unmasked: Judeophobia and theThreat to Civilization.

To be sure, some criticisms can be offered, starting with the movie’stitle. Those familiar with this topic likely are aware of most—if not all—ofthe matters discussed and therefore might ask what the movie purports to beunmasking. In addition, the film employs a “talking heads” format (numer-ous leading authorities, among them Alan Dershowitz, Caroline Glick, andEmanuele Ottolenghi, are included in the mix). While consistently interest-ing, such a format does not necessarily in its aggregate make a convincingcase that Judeophobia—irrational fear of Judaism and Jews—is behindabsolutely all animosity toward and disinformation about Israel today.Nonetheless, Unmasked provides a compelling springboard to thinkingabout how better to protect the safety of Jews and Israel in the contempo-rary world.

The film opens with Elie Wiesel ominously stating that in 1945, hewas convinced antisemitism had died with the last victims in Auschwitz,butthat never since then has he been as afraid as he is now of antisemitism.His intensely personal statement merits respect, yet, alas, we can questionwhether the direct evidence in 1945 signified the end of all antisemitism. InWiesel’s native Hungary alone, for example, there were anti-Jewishpogroms immediately following the end of the Second World War. And, nosmall measure of hate-fueled, anti-Jewish bigotry was involved in the Arabrejection of the UN Partition plan of 1947, to say nothing of the Arabattacks on Jews in the Middle East before and after the establishment ofmodern Israel.


Of the many themes taken up in Unmasked, the one that perhaps mostreadily may be perceived as constituting a threat to civilization is the smugand fatuous lunacy of the Iranian theocracy as projected to the world,mainly through its figurehead president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whilenotoriously anti-Israel, the Iranian theocracy also is heavily invested in Shi-ite versus Sunni power struggles among Islamic nations in the Middle East.Moreover, blatant religious mumbo-jumbo factors heavily into the Iranianleadership’s weltanschauung and strategic planning, irredeemably compli-cating efforts at rational international diplomacy with it.

Here is not the place to rehash contrasting information and allegationspertaining to Iran’s nuclear programs and to Ahmadinejad’s obnoxioustirades against Israel. Yet, Ahmadinejad personally intersects with anotherof Unmasked’s main themes, that of fraudulent academics—wherever in theworld they may be—promulgating fact-challenged anti-Israel and/or anti-Jewish hate speech. With his aggressive Holocaust denial, Ahmadinejadrepresents one of the nadirs of the bastardization of scholarship toantisemitic ends—a specific, focused bastardization of scholarship fre-quently and appropriately decried in Greenfield’s movie.

Regarding antisemitism on university campuses, Unmasked visits, inparticular, antisemitic incitements at the University of California Irvine.Because UCI is a public school, there had been much justifiable consterna-tion over the government’s failure to hold school administrators accounta-ble for creating and maintaining a safe campus. Unmasked, however, doesnot show viewers that subsequent, indispensable civil rights advocacy has,hearteningly, led to an amelioration of conditions. An October 26, 2010,guidance letter from the Obama administration’s Department of Education,Civil Rights Division, for instance, clarifies that Jews are protected underTitle IX. The existence of these protections alone, of course, does not guar-antee compliance and enforcement, yet ongoing community educationabout how to invoke the protections, if and when needed, should provebeneficial.

Whereas UC Irvine presents a cautionary tale of what can happen in apublicly funded school, we might in Princeton professor Robert George’sbehavior see a cautionary tale of what can happen at a private university.George is a conspicuous example of a figure being allowed to pervert aca-demic associations to unsavory political ends. Unapologetically in favor ofhaving Catholic dogma influence civil law in the United States, George haswritten that people only criticize Pope Pius XII—who, when a cardinal,infamously signed the Reichskonkordat treaty between the Vatican and theNazis—to discredit the Catholic Church and to weaken its “moral” influ-ence in the present day. We must, however, never forget that Jews in Ger-many had already been banned from the professions at the time Cardinal


Pacelli signed that treaty, and that the treaty pledged German bishops’ loy-alty to the Nazi government. Professor George, furthermore, as head of theAmerican Principles Project, sent his communications director ThomasPeters to a conference hosted in Poland by the viciously antisemitic FatherTadeusz Rydsyk. Kyle Mantyla’s published article, “Professor George HasSome Explaining to Do,” is a reply to this action. An e-mail we sent toProfessor George requesting comment has gone unanswered.

The importance of maintaining vigilance over academic standards isseen in many instances, including in the counter-factual, antisemitic disser-tation of Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas in book form,used frequently even today in PA schools, under the title The Other Side:the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.

Unmasked reminds us of many of the most outrageous of anti-Israeldefamation campaigns—that it is the “Fourth Reich,” that it is “apartheid,”that it is “racist”—and in the face of these propagandistic calumnies, wesuggest steadfastly reminding the world that the UN Partition Plan of 1947offered a reasonable two-state solution, which was rejected by, andresponded to with violence by, Arabs. Certainly it bears repeating that theIsraeli Declaration of Independence invites the Arab inhabitants of the landto participate in the democracy as full citizens. The ongoing lack of reci-procity of that good will is not at all difficult to confirm; today, for exam-ple, an Arab of means of whatever nationality may purchase privateproperty in Israel, but in Gaza and the PA-controlled West Bank, the pen-alty for selling property to a Jew is—chillingly—death.

*Joanne Intrator, MD, is in private practice and is assistant clinical professor ofpsychiatry at Mt. Sinai School of Medicine. Scott Rose writes frequently on cultureand the arts. They live in New York.

Where Norman Finkelstein and the ADL Meet

Yoav Shamir’s DefamationDogwoof Productions, 2009.

Nathan Abrams*

This documentary is an attempt by Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir tounderstand something he has heard much about but has never directlyexperienced as a sabra—antisemitism. In so doing, he travels to variouscountries, including Poland, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States. Hisjourney intertwines two interlinked narratives: (a) how young Israelis areraised in the shadow of the Holocaust and (b) the activities of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which is the largest organization in the worldcombatting antisemitism. Thus, he follows a group of Israeli high schoolchildren, as they prepare for a trip to Poland and then take that journey.Meanwhile, he visits the offices of the ADL in the United States to assessits influence.

This might well be the final installment in a trilogy of Shamir’s filmsthat includes Checkpoint (2003), about Israeli soldiers who man the check-points, and Flipping Out (2008), about what happens to these soldiers afterthey leave the army. Defamation concludes by exploring Israeli youthbefore they begin their military service. Shamir first had the idea to make afilm about antisemitism when Checkpoint was released. In one of thatfilm’s many reviews, he was called “the Israeli Mel Gibson” because theviews he had expressed, critical of Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians,suggested that he was a self-hater, even antisemitic. At first he was amused:“Being called an antisemite by an American Jewish reporter seemed com-pletely farfetched. How could someone who chooses to live outside of

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Israel, who did not do military service like me, who did not lose a grandfa-ther in the war like me, have the nerve to call me an antisemite? Until then Ihad never considered the central role that antisemitism plays in our lives.”However, upon reflection he realized that it is a constant buzz, always in thebackground, always annoying. After a while, you simply get used to it.How often are we really disturbed by the hum of an electric fixture or thedrone of passing cars?

Antisemitism may follow us like a shadow, but then again, who reallynotices his shadow on a daily basis?

Once I did start noticing it, I realized that antisemitism is actually a verypopular topic in the Israeli discourse. Not a day goes by without at leastone article in the newspaper mentioning “Nazis,” “the Holocaust,” or“antisemitism” (Yoav Shamir, http://www.defamation-thefilm.com/html/director.html, accessed December 2011).

In the first narrative, the young Israelis are prepared and counseledbefore their trip to visit the death camps. They watch Holocaust documenta-ries. They visit Yad Vashem. They are briefed about the secret serviceagents who will accompany them to prevent interaction with the local popu-lation. Along the way, they are told, with no deviation, that they are hatedand that they must be vigilant and protected at all times. When asked whythey are not leaving the hotel in the evening, one schoolgirl responds,“There are neo-Nazis in Poland. They are a threat. We’re in danger. Theycould knock on our doors and throw things through our windows.” Theywere briefed at dinner that they are not in a friendly country but in a rela-tively hostile environment. As another high school student recounted,“There are demonstrations out there. They could throw stones at us. Twoweeks ago drunken neo-Nazis came in and started banging on the doors,searching for Jews.” For their safety, the students are not allowed out of thehotel at night “because they hate us.” Another tells Shamir that “At theairport, the soldiers walk like Nazis, rigidly. They have an angry look ontheir faces. The ones who stamped our passports looked like SS officers.”

Naturally, the high school children receive a very blinkered view ofPoland. Their interactions with the locals are kept to a minimum, either bylack of linguistic knowledge, or because their guides keep them apart. Yet,two girls approach a group of three old men. Their communication is stiltedand both groups are left bewildered by the other because of their lack of acommon language. Later, the girls conclude the old men were antisemites,and seem genuinely surprised when Shamir informs them that what the menhad said was harmless.

Following their first visit to a death camp, the Israeli schoolchildrenfeel bad for not immediately experiencing an emotional affective response.

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“We feel guilt for not having any feelings or emotions,” they said. Theyclearly felt that they should be feeling much more strongly than they did. “Ifeel bad because I don’t feel emotional,” responded another. Shamirpresents the children as conditioned into a response they do not feel whenconfronted by the physical remains of the Shoah right at the site, in situ.Finally, at the museum at Auschwitz I, the children are able to cry, andShamir produces lingering shots of their emotional reactions.

In the second narrative, Shamir travels to New York City to explorethe Anti-Defamamation League. He meets with its director, AbrahamFoxman, and other senior staff, accompanying them on their various tripsabroad. Shamir attempts to balance Foxman’s voice with those who opposethe ADL, including Professor Norman Finkelstein, and John Mearsheimerand Stephen Walt, authors of the controversial book The Israel Lobby andU.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Shamirtakes a very skeptical view of the need for the ADL, continually question-ing its role, concluding that Foxman has to create a problem because heneeds a job. The ADL is represented as inflaming situations as much asthey help. Shamir wonders why so many powerful people, such as ambassa-dors and heads of state, want to take the time to meet Foxman. “It’s like apoker game in which Foxman bluffs the other side into thinking the Jewshave more influence and power in Washington than they really have,” hesays. Furthermore, he avers, antisemitism does not really exist in the UnitedStates anymore—but it does in the minds of Israeli government and theJewish big shots that make a living fighting it.

Shamir’s personal essay ultimately concludes that so much emphasis isput on the past, as horrific as it has been, that it is holding us back. Maybe,he feels, it is time to live in the present and to look to the future.

Funded by Israel, as well as various European countries (it is an Israel-Austria-US-Denmark co-production), the documentary is a very simpleaffair, lacking in the gimmicks that mar, for instance, the work of MichaelMoore. Though it features Shamir in doing the voiceover narrative, he israrely seen and does not become the subject of the documentary itself. Asbefitting a personal journey that begins with an interview of the director’sown elderly grandmother, the documentary is an opinion piece. It is notclaiming to be objective but rather wants to add its voice to the debate onantisemitism. While the opinions expressed will not be shared by all, it isworth watching this documentary as part of the overall discussion on thisimportant topic.

*Nathan Abrams is a senior lecturer in film studies and director of graduate studiesat Prifysgol Bangor University, Wales. He writes on Jews, Jewish diasporas, andU.S. public intellectuals and is a frequent contributor to the JSA. He can be con-tacted at [email protected].

AntisemiticaCollege Campus Activity Since 2002

AUSTRALIADaniel Wyner of the Australasian Union of Jewish Students says that the“vilification we feel as students on campus . . . [is] coming almost entirelyfrom the left.” Grahame Leonard, president of the Executive Council ofAustralian Jewry, says July 2006 had the most antisemitic incidents sincerecords began in 1945, and that many of the incidents were on campus. InSydney, some Jewish students have started to wear hats over their kippahs.Deon Kamien, former president of the Union of Jewish Students, told TheAge: “It’s not something I can put in words. A lot of students who wouldfeel very comfortable wearing a kippah or T-shirt with Hebrew words on itnow feel they are being targeted as Jews—not supporters of Israel, butJews. When they walk past socialist stalls [on campus] they are called f—ing Jews.”

CANADAIn September 2002, former Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu wasprevented from delivering a speech at Concordia University in Montrealafter a student protest turned violent. Some protesters harassed the predomi-nantly Jewish audience that had arrived for the speech, and there werereports of Holocaust survivors being assaulted. Figures such as World Jew-ish Congress secretary Avi Beker described the incident as indicative of an“antisemitic campaign” on North American campuses, while journalistLysiane Gagnon accused the university’s pro-Palestinian students union of“refus[ing] to blame those who broke windows, threw chairs around, spat atand shoved the Jewish students who wanted to hear Mr. Netanyahu.” Thestudent union’s vice president of communications refuted Gagnon’s charge,saying that his organization had on many occasions “publicly condemnedany acts of physical violence [ . . . ] especially those acts that wereantisemitic or anti-Arab in nature.” A representative of Concordia’s Soli-darity for Palestinian Human Rights organization said that only a small

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minority of protesters had engaged in violent acts, and argued that the pro-test itself was justified.

An advertisement in the Globe and Mail on December 17, 2002, signed by100 people, said that Canadian Jewish students are traumatized by on-cam-pus antisemitism and dare not speak out in support of Israel or Judaism.Signatories included Irving Abella, David Bercuson, Ramsay Cook,Michael Bliss, Margaret Atwood, Peter C. Newman, Neil Bissoondath,Francine Pelletier, and June Callwood.

In 2009, some members of the Hillel organization at York University inToronto were pursued and allegedly threatened by pro-Palestinian studentsat a protest. The Hillel students were allegedly barricaded into their center,while protesters allegedly shouted what the Jerusalem Post described as“anti-Jewish and anti-Israel slurs.” The claims of the antisemitic slurs werenot reported by the media present at the time, and some have suggested thatthis accusation lacks credibility. Two pro-Palestinian students, KrisnaSaravanamuttu and Jesse Zimmerman, were fined for violating the univer-sity code of conduct.

Generally, York University faculty have largely rejected claims of increasedantisemitism on their campus. On April 5, 2010, two students, one of whomis Jewish, were assaulted by a group of men outside a local bar for connec-tions with an Israeli advocacy group, the Israel Awareness Committee, atCarleton University. The students, who both attend Carleton, wereapproached by a group of assailants, who yelled at them for being “Jews”and “Zionists.” The assailants, who were identified by one of the victims asfellow Carleton students, proceeded to assault the two students, and one ofthe perpetrators wielded a machete and began swinging at one of the vic-tims. The two students escaped their attackers on foot with only minor inju-ries. Investigation into this incident was ongoing, and no suspects wereapprehended.

2011] ANTISEMITICA 839

Bernie Farber, the leader of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said that he hadnever before seen such a bad atmosphere on Toronto streets and universitycampuses. Some have objected to this assertion. The author Rick Salutinargues that accusations of a “new antisemitism” in contemporary Canadaare usually unspecific, and do not include verifiable names or quotations.He has also written that incidents of “name calling and group hate” at pro-tests are not indicative of a new wave of antisemitism, which is universallyregarded as unacceptable within mainstream Canadian discourse.

FRANCEPatrick Klugman, president of the Union of French Jewish Students (UEJF),wrote in Le Figaro: “On some university campuses like Nanterre, Vil-letaneuse and Jussieu, the climate has become very difficult for Jews. In thename of the Palestinian cause, they are castigated as if they were Israelisoldiers! We hear ‘death to the Jews’ during demonstrations that are sup-posed to defend the Palestinian cause. Last April, our office was the targetof a Molotov cocktail. As a condition for condemning this attack, the lectur-ers demanded that the UEJF declare a principled position against Israel!”

UNITED KINGDOM

The Report of the All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry into Anti-Semitism statedthat “when left wing or pro-Palestinian discourse is manipulated and usedas a vehicle for anti-Jewish language and themes, the anti-Semitism isharder to recognize and define . . .” The inquiry heard that University Col-lege, London, invited members of the Islamist party Hizb-ut-Tahrir to givepresentations, although it has been banned from several countries becauseof its antisemitism. Hizb-ut-Tahrir has also been active at Queen Mary,University of London; Kingston University; and Birmingham CityUniversity.


The report describes how “tensions and incidents on campus oftenpeak around students’ union votes concerning Israel and Zionism,” listingas examples several incidents precipitated by a University of Manchesterstudent union motion to declare that anti-Zionism was not antisemitism andthat Israeli goods should be boycotted. During the voting phase, accordingto the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester, a leaflet fromthe General Union of Palestinian Students quoting a neo-Nazi forgery enti-tled “Prophecy of Benjamin Franklin in Regard of the Jewish Race,” washanded out to students lining up to vote. The leaflet described Jews as“vampires,” claiming that if they were not expelled from the United States,they would “enslave the country and destroy its economy.” When themotion was defeated, a brick was thrown through the window of one Jewishstudent residence while a poster with the words “Slaughter the Jews” wasstuck to its front door, and a knife was stuck in the door of another.

UNITED STATESThe Anti-Defamation League’s audit of antisemitic/anti-Israel events oncollege campuses across the United States included accounts of violent inci-dents. A rally held by the Muslim Student Association at San FranciscoState University (SFSU) displayed posters bearing a picture of soup cansreading “Made in Israel” on the label, listing the contents as “PalestinianChildren Meat,“ with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as the manufac-turer, and the words “slaughtered according to Jewish Rites under Americanlicense.”

A group of pro-Israel demonstrators at SFSU were confronted by pro-Pales-tinian counter-demonstrators after a rally. Both sides were described as“exchang[ing] taunts that descended into slurs”; the pro-Israel students wereescorted back to the Hillel building under police protection. The universitypresident subsequently remarked that “a small but terribly destructive num-


ber of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, many of whom were not SFSU stu-dents, abandoned themselves to intimidating behavior and statements toohate-filled to repeat.” Members of this group were reported to have yelled,“Hitler didn’t finish the job.” This was adamantly denied by Palestinianactivists present at the rally, who accused the pro-Israel demonstrators ofcalling the Arab students “sand niggers” and “terrorists.” According toLeila Qutami of SFSU’s General Union of Palestine Students, “We werecalled ‘Arab losers’ and told to stick flags up our asses. And those are thethings that are mentionable.” One Jewish member of the pro-Palestiniancounter-demonstration was quoted as saying that she heard “a couple ofinappropriate, anti-Semitic things,” but that these were not representative ofher organization’s opinion. She blamed the presence of antisemites in thepro-Palestinian cause on “the confusion of Zionism with Judaism.”

There also were significant tensions between Jewish and Palestinian studentgroups at the University of California Berkeley. During Passover, a cinderblock was thrown through the front windows of the university’s Hillelcenter and the words “F—k the Jews” were written on the center’srecycling bins. The culprits were never found, and these acts were con-demned by Palestinian student leaders. Palestinian students also argued thatthey were subject to harassment on campus, and were labeled as terroristsor antisemites for voicing their opposition to Israel. The tensions were espe-cially strong on April 9, when two rival events took place at the same time:Jewish student groups held a vigil for Holocaust Remembrance Day, whileStudents for Justice in Palestine held a National Day of Action in conjunc-tion with the anniversary of the Deir Yassin Massacre. Some Jewish stu-dents criticized the pro-Palestinian group for distributing pamphlets thatdrew parallels between the Holocaust and Israel’s military assault on Pales-tinian territories, while Palestinian students again complained that theywere frequently slandered as antisemitic. A member of Jews for a Free Pal-estine who tried to recite a Hebrew prayer at the Palestinian event wasdrowned out by students from the Israel Action Committee, who repeatedlyshouted “shame.”

On February 16, 2006, members of the UC Berkeley Jewish fraternitychapter, Alpha Epsilon Pi, were victimized by a racial slur when a memberwoke up Monday morning and discovered the word “kike” painted in whiteon the deck of that member’s house the night before. The fraternity reportedthat although they had been targeted by racially charged comments before,Sunday’s incident was the worst instance of antisemitism they had exper-ienced. “It’s just really sad, in this day and age, that antisemitism can stillexist on such a progressive campus,” said Joe Rothberg, president of thefraternity. “It’s just depressing.”


Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University,has written how two students of his wondered whether it was true that 4,000Jews had failed to show up for work at the World Trade Center on Septem-ber 11. “The worst crackpot notions that circulate around the Middle Eastare also roaming around America,” Gitlin writes, “and if that weren’t badenough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students!”

In late October 2007, five swastikas were drawn on several buildings in thedormitories of George Washington University. One of these swastikas wasfound on the door of a Jewish student. University officials condemned theoccurrences.

A Hillel staff member at Brown University was attacked on March 15,2008, when two Molotov cocktails were thrown at his apartment. The staffmember was safe and continues to work at the Hillel Center at Brown, butmoved out of his apartment. Law enforcement and university officials tookthe matter very seriously.

Graffiti depicting a Star of David between the Twin Towers as an airplaneflies toward them was found outside a classroom at UC Santa Cruz. Belowthe image of the towers was the number 666, a symbolic number represent-ing the Antichrist. University faculty and administration quickly con-demned the act as a hate crime.

The Zionist Organization of America filed a complaint against UC Irvine in2005, alleging that the university had failed to take action against Islamicstudent groups that had allegedly engaged in antisemitic activities. Federalinvestigators declined to lay charges, determining that the activities in ques-tion were based on political opposition to the policies of Israel rather than


antisemitism. In May 2009, UC Irvine hosted a two-week event, “Israel:The Politics of Genocide,” sponsored by the school’s Muslim StudentUnion. Scheduled speakers included Cynthia McKinney and George Gallo-way. Opponents of the event described it as antisemitic, and called for theuniversity chancellor to condemn both the event and the sponsoring organi-zation. A 2009 letter obtained from UC Irvine and addressed to the univer-sity’s chancellor from Jewish Federations of Orange County divulges thatstudents on a university-sponsored trip to the Middle East met with a “nota-ble Hamas figure,” Aziz Duwaik, in an “unapproved” meeting in September2009. Another of the featured speakers at the 2009 event was Imam AmirAbdel Malik Ali, who delivered a speech entitled “Silence Is Consent.”According to the university newspaper, Malik Ali described Zionism as aracist ideology, and denounced what he described as U.S. imperialism. Onestudent wrote an opinion piece that accused Malik Ali of promoting “nakedhate” and of fomenting various antisemitic conspiracy theories against“Zionist Jews,” including the belief that Jews were responsible for theattacks of September 11, 2001, and quoted him as saying, “[The] ZionistJew is in the party of Shaytan [Islamic term for ‘Satan’] . . . they follow theShaytan’s power . . . they like to operate behind closed doors.”

Objets d’art d’antisemitisme

The Eternal Jew, Exhibition at the Wolfson Museum of Jewish Art,Jerusalem, January 5 – December 2012.

From the Peter Ehrenthal Collection, Moriah Galleries, New York.

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Excerpted Address to theEdinburgh University Student Association

Denis MacEoin*

It is because I am well informed in Middle Eastern affairs that I am shocked and disheartened bythe EUSA motion and vote. I am shocked for a simple reason: there is not and has never been a systemof apartheid in Israel. That is not my opinion; that is fact that can be tested against reality by anyEdinburgh student, should he or she choose to visit Israel to see for themselves.

Let me spell this out, since I have the impression that those members of EUSA who voted for thismotion are absolutely clueless in matters concerning Israel, and that they are, in all likelihood, thevictims of extremely biased propaganda coming from the anti-Israel lobby. Being anti-Israel is not initself objectionable. But I’m not talking about ordinary criticism of Israel. I’m speaking of a hatred thatpermits itself no boundaries in the lies and myths it pours out. Thus, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a“Nazi” state. In what sense is this true, even as a metaphor? Where are the Israeli concentration camps?The einzatsgruppen? The SS? The Nuremberg Laws? The Final Solution? None of these things noranything remotely resembling them exists in Israel, precisely because the Jews, more than anyone onearth, understand what Nazism stood for. It is claimed that there has been an Israeli Holocaust in Gaza(or elsewhere). Where? When? No honest historian would treat that claim with anything but the con-tempt it deserves. But calling Jews “Nazis” and saying they have committed a Holocaust is as basic away to subvert historical fact as anything I can think of.

Under Israeli law, Arab Israelis have exactly the same rights as Jews or anyone else; Muslims havethe same rights as Jews or Christians; Baha’is, severely persecuted in Iran, flourish in Israel, where theyhave their world center; Ahmadi Muslims, severely persecuted in Pakistan and elsewhere, are kept safeby Israel; the holy places of all religions are protected under a specific Israeli law. Arabs form 20% ofthe university population (an exact echo of their percentage in the general population). In Iran, theBaha’is (the largest religious minority) are forbidden to study in any university or to run their ownuniversities; why aren’t your members boycotting Iran?

Arabs in Israel can go anywhere they want, unlike blacks in apartheid South Africa. They usepublic transport, they eat in restaurants, they go to swimming pools, they use libraries, they go to cine-mas alongside Jews—something no blacks could do in South Africa. Israeli hospitals not only treat Jewsand Arabs, they also treat Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank. On the same wards, in the sameoperating theaters . . .

I do not object to well-documented criticism of Israel. I do object when supposedly intelligentpeople single the Jewish state out above states that are horrific in their treatment of their populations.We are going through the biggest upheaval in the Middle East since the 7th and 8th centuries, and it’sclear that Arabs and Iranians are rebelling against terrifying regimes that fight back by killing their owncitizens. Israel citizens, Jews and Arabs alike, do not rebel (though they are free to protest). Yet Edin-burgh students mount no demonstrations and call for no boycotts against Libya, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia,Yemen, and Iran. They prefer to make false accusations against one of the world’s freest countries, theonly country in the Middle East that has taken in Darfur refugees, the only country in the Middle Eastthat gives refuge to gay men and women, the only country in the Middle East that protects the Baha’is. . . Need I go on? The imbalance is perceptible, and it sheds no credit on anyone who voted for thisboycott.

*August 17, 2011. Denis MacEoin is a lecturer in Islamic studies and a former senior editor of theMiddle East Quarterly.

I’m not well if you are sick; I’m not rich if you are poor.I can’t live if you’re not free; I depend on you and you can depend on me.A brother is no bother—we all have the same Father.

—Hugh Mann

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