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May 16, 2002
Steve Perry
Unsafe at Any Speed:
Youth, Sex and the Heresies
of Judith Levine
May 15, 2002
Ahmad Faruqui
Revisiting
Camp David
Rick Giombetti
Spiderman v. Pentagon:
Working Class Hero Battles Corrupt Defense Contractors
Stanton / Madsen
When the
War Hits Home:
Planning for Martial Law, Telegovernance and Suspension of Elections
May 14, 2002
Jacob Levich
Leaving the Truth Out?
Alternative Online Publication
Tells the Big Lie about Palestine
Michael Colby
Bush's
Cuba Blunder
Dave Marsh
Scapegoats: the Music Industry's War
on Cassettes
Jensen / Mahajan
US Power
Mideast Power Plays
May 13, 2002
Robert Fisk
Why Does John Malkovich
Want to Kill Me?
Mokhiber / Weissman
IMF
and World Bank:
Out of Control
Dean Baker
Will Darth Vader do Time?
The Enron Saga Continues
Nelson Valdés
American
Democracy:
A Lesson for Cubans
May 12, 2002
Bernard Weiner
Why Is America Acting Like This? A
Letter to European Friends
John Patrick Leary
Aiding Colombia
Kathleen Christison
Israel
and Ethics
May 11, 2002
Joady Guthrie
The Holy Lands:
A Peace Vision
Patrick Cockburn
Bombing
Iraq:
the Pentagon Prepares a Prolonged Campaign
George Sunderland
CounterPunch Special
Our
Vichy Congress: Israel's Stranglehold on Capitol Hill
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Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
The New Crusade:
America's War on Terrorism
By Rahul Mahajan
The Memphis Blues Again:
Six Decades of Memphis Music Photographs
Photos by Ernest Withers
Text by Daniel Wolff
The New Intifada:
Resisting Israel's Apartheid
Edited by Roane Carey
A Pocket Guide to
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May
16, 2002
American Journal
Israel and "Anti-Semitism"
by Alexander Cockburn
Right in the wake of House Majority leader Dick
Armey's explicit call for two million Palestinians to be booted
out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem and Gaza as well, came
yet one more of those earnest articles accusing a vague entity
called "the left" of anti-Semitism.
This one was in Salon, by a man called
Dennis Fox, identified as an associate professor of legal studies
and psychology at the University of Illinois. Leaving nothing
to chance, Salon titled Fox's contribution, "The shame of
the pro-Palestinian left: Ignorance and anti-Semitism are undercutting
the moral legitimacy of Israel's critics."
Over the past 20 years I've learned there's
a quick way of figuring just how badly Israel is behaving. There's
a brisk uptick in the number of articles here accusing "the
left" of anti-Semitism. These articles adopt varying strategies.
Particularly intricate, though I think well-intentioned, was
a recent column by Naomi Klein who wrote that "It is precisely
because anti-Semitism is used by the likes of Sharon that the
fight against it must be reclaimed." Is Klein saying the
anti-globalization movement has forgotten how to be anti-anti-Semitic?
I don't think it has. Are all denunciations of the government
of Israel to be prefaced by strident assertions of pro-Semitism?
If this is the case, can we not ask that
those concerned about the supposed silence of the left regarding
anti-Semitism demonstrate their own good faith by denouncing
Israel's behavior towards Palestinians? Klein did, but most don't.
In a recent piece in the New York Times
Frank Rich managed to write an entire column puportedly about
Jewish overreaction here to news reporting from Israel without
even a fleeting reference to the fact that there might be some
factual basis for reports presenting Israel and its leaders in
a bad light, even though he found time for plenty of abuse for
the "inexcusable" Arafat. Isn't Sharon "inexcusable"
in Rich's book?
So the left gets the rotten eggs and
those tossing the eggs mostly don't feel it necessary to concede
that Israel is a racist state whose obvious and provable intent
is to continue to steal Palestinian land, oppress Palestinians,
herd them into smaller and smaller enclaves and in all likelihood
ultimately drive them into the sea or Lebanon or Jordan or Dearborn
or the space in Dallas/Fort Worth airport between the third and
fourth runways (the bold Armey plan).
Here's how Fox begins his article for
Salon: '"Let's move back," my wife insisted when she
saw the nearby banner: "Israel Is a Terrorist State!"
We were at the April 20 Boston march opposing Israel's incursion
into the West Bank. So drop back we did, dragging our friends
with us to wait for an empty space we could put between us and
the anti-Israel sign.' Inference by Fox: the banner is grotesque,
presumptively anti-Semitic. But there are plenty of sound arguments
that from the Palestinian point of view Israel is indeed a terrorist
state, and anyway, even if it wasn't, the description would not
per se be evidence of anti-Semitism. Only if the banner read
"All Jews are terrorists", would Fox have a point.
Of course the rhetorical trick is to
conflate "Israel" or "the State of Israel"
with "Jews" and argue that they are synonymous. Ergo,
to criticize Israel is to be anti-Semitic. Leave aside the fact
that many of Israel's most articulate critics are Jews, honorably
committed to the cause of justice for all in the Middle East.
Many Jews just don't like hearing bad things said about Israel,
same way they don't like reading articles about the Jewish lobby
here. Mention the lobby and someone like Fox will rush into print
denouncing those who "toy with the old anti-Semitic canard
that the Jews control the press."
These days you can't even say that New
York Times is owned by a Jewish family without risking charges
that you stand in Goebbels' shoes. I even got accused of anti-Semitism
the other day for mentioning that the Jews founded Hollywood,
which they most certainly did, as recounted in a funny and informative
book published in 1988, An
Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
by Neal Gabler.
So cowed are commentators (which is of
course the prime motive of those charges of anti-Semitism) that
even after the US Congress recently voted full-throated endorsement
of Sharon and Israel, with only two senators and 21 US reps (I
exclude the chickenshit 28 who voted "present") voting
against, you could scarcely find a mainstream paper prepared
to analyze this astounding demonstration of the power of AIPAC
and other Jewish organizations, plus the Christian Right and
the military industrial complex which profits enormously from
military aid to Israel since Congress put through a law concerning
US overall aid to Israel, to the effect that 75 per cent of such
supplies must be bought from US firms like Raytheon and Lockheed-Martin,
lobbying for Israel.
The encouraging fact is that despite
the efforts of the Southern Povery Law Center to drum up funds
by hollering that the Nazis are about to march down Main Street,
there's remarkably little anti-Semitism in the US, and almost
none that I've ever been able to detect on the American left,
which is of course amply stocked with non-self-hating Jews. It's
comical to find the left's assailants trudging all the way back
to Leroi Jones and the 60s to dig up the necessary anti-Semitic
jibes. The less encouraging fact is that there's not nearly enough
criticism of Israel's ghastly conduct towards Palestinians, which
in its present phase is testing the waters for reaction here
to a major ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, just as Armey called
for.
So why don't people like Fox write about
Armey's appalling remarks, (which the White House declared he
hadn't made,) instead of trying to change the subject with nonsense
about anti-Semitism? It's not anti-Semitic to denounce ethnic
cleansing, a strategy which according to recent polls, around
half all Israeli Jews now heartily endorse. In this instance
the left really has nothing to apologize for, but those who accuse
of it of anti-Semitism certainly do. They're apologists for policies
put into practice by racists, ethnic cleansers and in Sharon's
case, an unquestioned war criminal who should be in the dock
for his conduct.
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