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CounterPunch
August
23, 2002
American
Journal
Eric Alterman Cheapens Holocaust
by Alexander Cockburn
On the last Nation cruise I was on a panel about
nuclear proliferation. (Yes, even afloat off Baja California,
the liberal conscience is always on guard duty.) Trying to juice
up the panel a bit, I remarked that there was one bit of proliferation
that seemed to me indisputably okay, which was when the Soviet
Union acquired the know-how to make A and H bombs, thus ending
the US monopoly on Armageddon, and in my view making the world
a safer place. (My position, very shocking to Jonathan Schell,
is that every country should have at least one thermonuclear
device, if necessary donated by the World Bank along with the
"national" flag.)
Nation and MSNBC mini-pundit Eric Alterman
was chairing the session. He immediately shed any pretense of
neutrality. Was Cockburn, he snarled at the audience, seeing
something commendable in the transfer of atomic secrets to the
most evil man the world had ever known?
Which shows just how dumb Alterman is,
since at least 2/3rds of the audience of Nation seniors, the
only subscribers who can afford to pony up for these cruises,
were either in the Communist Party or in close sympathy with
it. A chill silence greeted Alterman's ill-mannered interruption
and then one old boy piped up angrily and said that it was the
Red Army which saved the day for the Allies at Stalingrad. Then
Jonathan Schell remarked that my position was identical to that
of Sakharov.
Alterman ended up looking silly, and
so I wasn't too surprised when one of the Nation guests sitting
next to me at dinner reported Alterman was going around saying
I was an anti-Semite.
Now, being called an anti-Semite these
days isn't what it was. The term has got cheapened. As Michael
Neumann writes in his brilliant piece on this site, anti-Semitism
is "action or propaganda designed to hurt Jews, not because
of anything they could avoid doing, but because they are what
they are."
But these days people don't flourish
the charge of anti-Semitism because they've heard someone quoting
the Protocols or saying that the Jews kill Christian babies.
Anti-Semitism has become like a flit gun to squirt at every inconvenient
fly on the window-pane. It's a tool of convenience, used mostly
to whack critics of the disgusting conduct of successive Israeli
governments and security forces and settlers towards the Palestinians.
Maybe Alterman began to think of me as
an anti-Semite after, years ago, I wrote that he was three quarters
brown-noser and one quarter cheeky chappie. I came to this conclusion
after being invited by the spring-heeled Alterman in his Yale
days to go and talk about the press. Since in those days I was
the in-house critic at the Village Voice of the policies of the
Begin government young Eric knew what he was getting, but nonetheless
positively fell over himself with pleasantries as he led me towards
the seminar.
These days, at the Nation and on MSNBC
he patrols the Democratic perimeter, nipping at the heels of
any view over-stepping the bounds of decorous mainstream conversation.
The word "Nader" brings an angry flush to his cheeks.
"Greens" make him bilious. The cheeky chappie of yesteryear
is getting the sour edge that mini-pundits acquire when they
realize that mini-pundits are what they are always doomed to
remain. When Sharon's F-16s blew away some kids in Gaza, collateral
damage in the effort to kill a Hamas leader, Alterman had this
to say on his MSNBC site,
"I don't know if killing the military
chief of Hamas,
together with his family, is an effective military
measure-as surely someone will rise to replace him and it
will make a lot more people angry, perhaps even angry enough
to become suicide bombers. It may not bring Israel and the
Palestinians any closer to peace or mutual security. But I
don't have a moral problem with it.
"Hamas is clearly at war with Israel.
Hamas feels empowered to strike Israeli civilians inside Israel
proper and not just on the war zone of West Bank. Sheik Salah
Shehada could have protected his family by keeping away from
them. He didn't and owing to his clear legitimacy as a military
target, they are dead too...So tough luck, fella."
Which is presumably what those Palestinian
suicide bombers say, as they press the button on their built-in
bombs amid a crowd of Jewish kids.
I guess the blatancy of the evictions
of Hilliard and McKinney has people like Alterman worried. Suddenly,
I'm not just an anti-Semite. I'm shackled to Louis Farrakhan.
Here's what Alterman put up on his site a couple of days ago.
"Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-Tex.),
chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, said that "at the
grass roots" among African American voters, there is a growing
perception that 'Jewish people are attempting to pick our leaders...here
is some concern about that. It's concern about any candidate
being targeted by a special-interest group for voting on any
one issue.' I think AIPAC et al are being very stupid by targeting
black Congressman who don't vote 'right' on Israel. Congress
could not be more pro-Israeli if it were taking orders from my
(late) bubbe and zeida. One vote, one voice, here or there makes
no difference. Because it plays into anti-Jew stereotypes, this
kind of heavy-handed financial intervention to pick the winner
of a largely African American race is actually a boon to anti-Semites
of the black and extremist left-wing varieties. (See under: 'Louis
Farrakhan' and 'Alexander Cockburn.') What AIPAC et al appear
to be saying is 'We will tolerate no dissent of any kind on
Israel in American public life.' They do Israel and America's
Jews no favor."
Now, behind the colorful conjunction
of "anti-Semitism" with the F word and yours truly's
name, what's Alterman saying here? That by defeating McKinney,
the Jewish lobby is providing fuel for anti-Semites? That therefore
it's a bad thing? Not that it's bad to defeat McKinney, per
se. Merely that it's a strategical error because then the real
enemy can rant and rave about it? It's not the display of raw
power so much as how flagrant the display is? What's wrong with
McKinney's defeat (so Alterman seems to be saying) is that it
reveals how much Congress is controlled by the Israeli lobby.
Sad, no? Here's Alterman using the term
Anti-Semitism to attack people outraged by the way McKinney and
Hilliard were driven from Congress, and by the horrible persecution
of Palestinians in Israel. It's a debauch of a term that once
meant something awful, a term that once set the milestones to
Auschwitz, now bandied about on MSNBC and on a Nation cruise
as Eric's little paint brush.
A final note to Alterman and the Nation's
or MSNBC's lawyers: Careful how you go here. I'm placing you
on notice that though I think Alterman and those like him have
cheapened the term almost to meaninglessness, the slur of "anti-Semitism"
is still intended as a fatal charge; and so the motivation and
rationales for its usage are susceptible of examination in a
law court.
Today's Features
Dave Marsh
Selling
Out?
William Hughes
Lieberman's
Conflict of Interest?
Kurt Nimmo
The Lapdog
Conversion of CNN:
They Didn't Want to "Criticize" a Popular War
Sean Donahue
Hardline
in Colombia
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- War Talk As White Noise:
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August 23,
2002
Dave Marsh
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