2011-12-07

Anti-Semitism: Diverting the Focus Away From the Real Problem


The most persistent form of anti-Semitism has been a series of widely circulating stereotypes that constructed Jews as socially, religiously, and economically unacceptable to American life. They were made out to be marginal and menacing.

A set of distinct and consistent negative stereotypes, some of which can be traced as far back as the Middle Ages in Europe, has been applied to Jews.
1.-  [American] Jews are seen as being powerful and manipulative.
2.-  They are accused of dividing their loyalties between the United States and Israel.
3.-  Jewish materialistic values, aggressiveness, clannishness.

Statistics

The 2005 Survey of American Attitudes Towards Jews in America, a national poll of 1,600 American adults conducted in March 2005, found that 14% of Americans - or nearly 35 million adults - hold views about Jews that are "unquestionably anti-Semitic."

Among white people:  the number of Americans with hardcore anti-Semitic beliefs had dropped to 12%.
Among foreign-born Hispanics: 35%
Among black people: 36%

The 2005 Anti-Defamation League survey includes data on Hispanic attitudes, with 29% being most antisemitic (vs. 9% for whites and 36% for blacks); being born in the United States helped alleviate this attitude: 35% of foreign-born Hispanics, but only 19% of those born in the US.

A 2009 study entitled "Modern Anti-Semitism and Anti-Israeli Attitudes", published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2009, tested new theoretical model of anti-Semitism among Americans in the Greater New York area with 3 experiments. The research team's theoretical model proposed that mortality salience (reminding people that they will someday die) increases anti-Semitism and that anti-Semitism is often expressed as anti-Israel attitudes. The first experiment showed that mortality salience led to higher levels of anti-Semitism and lower levels of support for Israel. The study’s methodology was designed to tease out anti-Semitic attitudes that are concealed by polite people . The second experiment showed that mortality salience caused people to perceive Israel as very important, but did not cause them to perceive any other country this way. The third experiment showed that mortality salience led to a desire to punish Israel for human rights violations but not to a desire to punish Russia or India for identical human rights violations. According to the researchers, their results “suggest that Jews constitute a unique cultural threat to many people’s worldviews, that anti-Semitism causes hostility to Israel, and that hostility to Israel may feed back to increase anti-Semitism.” Furthermore, "those claiming that there is no connection between antisemitism and hostility toward Israel are wrong."

Necessary Illusions by Noam Chomsky (1989) - Excerpt

There is no space to comment here on the vicious racist depiction of Arabs in novels, television, cartoons and cinema, or the crucial support in the American Jewish community for Rabbi Kahane, who is commonly denounced as a Nazi in Israeli commentary, and for other groups within Israel that are only marginally less extreme in their intentions with regard to the Arab population and attitudes towards them.

Those who express their fear and concern over manifestations of anti-Semitism among Blacks and others might be taken seriously if they were to pay even the slightest attention to what is said by their friends and associates. They do not.

The matter of racism and the Arab-Jewish conflict is more complex. The anti-Arab racism that has become so familiar as to be unnoticed has been accompanied by apparent concern over anti-Semitism; that the qualification is accurate is evident from a closer look at the revision that the concept of anti-Semitism has undergone in the process. There have long been efforts to identify anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in an effort to exploit anti-racist sentiment for political ends; "one of the chief tasks of any dialogue with the Gentile world is to prove that the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is not a distinction at all," Israeli diplomat Abba Eban argued, in a typical expression of this intellectually and morally disreputable position. But that no longer suffices. It is now necessary to identify criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitism -- or in the case of Jews, as "self-hatred," so that all possible cases are covered.

The leading official monitor of anti-Semitism, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith, interprets anti-Semitism as unwillingness to conform to its requirements with regard to support for Israeli authorities. These conceptions were clearly expounded by ADL National Director Nathan Perlmutter, who wrote that while old-fashioned anti-Semitism has declined, there is a new and more dangerous variety on the part of "peacemakers of Vietnam vintage, transmuters of swords into plowshares, championing the terrorist P.L.O.," and those who condemn U.S. policies in Vietnam and Central America while "sniping at American defense budgets." He fears that "nowadays war is getting a bad name and peace too favorable a press" with the rise of this "real anti-Semitism." The logic is straightforward: Anti-Semitism is opposition to the interests of Israel (as the ADL sees them); and these interests are threatened by "the liberals," the churches, and others who do not adhere to the ADL political line.

The ADL has virtually abandoned its earlier role as a civil rights organization, becoming "one of the main pillars" of Israeli propaganda in the U.S., as the Israeli press casually describes it, engaged in surveillance, blacklisting, compilation of FBI-style files circulated to adherents for the purpose of defamation, angry public responses to criticism of Israeli actions, and so on. These efforts, buttressed by insinuations of anti-Semitism or direct accusations, are intended to deflect or undermine opposition to Israeli policies, including Israel's refusal, with U.S. support, to move towards a general political settlement. The ADL blacklist to campus Jewish leaders, stamped "confidential." Practices of this nature have been bitterly condemned by Israeli doves -- in part because they fear the consequences of this hysterical chauvinism for Israel, in part because they have been subjected to the standard procedures themselves, in part simply in natural revulsion.

Anti-Semitism, in short, is not merely conflated with anti-Zionism, but even extended to Zionists who are critical of Israeli practices. Correspondingly, authentic anti-Semitism on the part of those whose services to Israeli power are deemed appropriate is of no account.

These two aspects of "the real anti-Semitism," ADL-style, were illustrated during the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign. The Democratic Party was denounced for anti-Semitism on the grounds that its convention dared to debate a resolution calling for a two-state political settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In contrast, when an array of Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites were exposed in August 1988 in the Bush presidential campaign, the major Jewish organizations and leaders were, for the most part, "curiously blasé about both the revelations and Bush's response to them," largely ignoring the matter, John Judis comments. The New Republic dismissed as a minor matter the "antique and anemic forms of anti-Semitism" of virulent anti-Semites and Nazi and fascist sympathizers at a high level of the Republican campaign organization. The editors stressed, rather, the "comfortable haven for Jew-hatred on the left, including the left wing of the Democratic Party," parts of the Jackson campaign, and "the ranks of increasingly well-organized Arab activists," all of whom supported the two-state resolution at the Party convention and thus qualify as "Jew-haters."

The point is that the ultra-right Republicans are regarded as properly supportive of Israel by hard-line standards, while the Democratic Party reveals its "Jew-hatred" by tolerating elements that believe that Palestinians are human beings with the same rights as Jews, including the right of national self-determination alongside of Israel. Following the lead of the major Jewish organizations, the Democrats carefully avoided the discovery of anti-Semites and Nazis in the Republican campaign headquarters and the continuing close links after exposure.

Further Reading



Some Strange Conclusions

Israel is a foreign nation. A sovereign state. For an American to place the interests of a foreign nation ahead of the interests of the United States is TREASON. It's as simple as that. Whether it is an organization or an individual - especially a member of our own government - treason requires a stern punishment. So stern, in fact, that none but a lunatic would commit it. As far as foreign nations carrying out acts of violence and terrorism against American citizens, that is an ACT OF WAR against the United States. It goes without saying, that an act of war against the United States amounts to national suicide.

Marx has an interesting idea: Get rid of huckstering and the worship of money and there is no basis for the popular conception of the Jew.

De Leon has another interesting idea: Get rid of the Bible and their is no basis for Semitism.

With only 9-12% of white Americans, 19-35% of Mexican Americans and 36% of black Americans believing in Anti-Semitism... Well, all you Anti-Semites, you'll just have to take your message to the minorities... nobody else is buying it. 

By the way, there is an interesting article by Amadeo Bordiga (1960), entitled: Auschwitz, or the Great Alibi. Check it out...HERE

This article has a slightly controversial history, having never been published under Bordiga’s name. It originally appeared, though, in 1960 in a French Bordigist journal, Programme Communiste, and Bordiga himself never spoke out against its theses. And so, echoing the ancients, we will call the author the pseudo-Bordiga.

The article was published as a pamphlet in 1970 by Pierre Guillaume, former member of Bordiga’s Parti Communist International and of the group around the ultra-left bookstore “La Vieille Taupe.” In a later incarnation La Vieille Taupe was to become the voice of left-wing holocaust denial, and it is in Guillaume’s early affection for this article – which appears on the web not only at marxists.org, but on revisionist websites – that we can see the germ of the movement.

"Indeed, it is an easy step from “Auschwitz or the Great Alibi” to complete denial of the Holocaust." say the Communists.

I think that perhaps they didn't really comprehend what the article was saying. See what you think....

Postscript

An article just came out today in Pravda: US Jewish community: The strongest in the world

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