Photograph Source: Clay Hensley – CC BY-SA 2.0
The re-coronation of the lumpen-capitalist Donald Trump as US president is a no-doubt consequential moment. Yet Trump has increasingly been second banana to one of his many Rasputins, the far-right techie Elon Musk. In an objective sense, however, the richest man in the world giving what is inarguably a Nazi salute at the inauguration of the president of the United States is an event of historical and international significance. This gesture from Musk was a crystallization of all that Trump is doing, and in particular, a prime form of the new far right’s aestheticization of politics. The politics of the gesture, the image, that crystalizes what in many ways is a redefinition and narrowing of what constitutes what the American state sees as human. So of course, the international benefactor of the far right is going to give a Nazi salute. This is the same guy who within days of the salute, gave a Nazi-esque speech to the Post-Nazi AFD in Germany, calling on Germans to reject globalism and embrace their historic warrior-like ways, as pointed out by Julius Caesar!
The question here is how its significance is being downplayed, deliberately or not, in an official and unofficial sense, from the pillars of American society, after being given the go ahead by some figures in the Jewish establishment. Musk did not give a Nazi salute, he made an “awkward gesture”. Broadcast journalists like Erin Burnett are exemplars of this pattern. This has been echoed even by Jewish conservative pundits like Ben Shapiro, not to mention some reasonable-doubt-mongers at The Forward. Their raised eyebrows and seemingly verbal scare-quotes when using this phrase reveal them not to be dissenting in an aestheticized sense but rather showing their resignation to the moment and their opportunism, their desire to reproduce themselves and their socially and materially beneficial existence. This goes of course, most shamefully to the Anti-Defamation League which did not condemn Musk, indeed explicitly denied that his gesture was a Nazi salute. The ADL are increasingly echoed in media reports that at first simply didn’t report on it or just referred to it elliptically.
The ADL are being broadly condemned, not just by the far left who have long pointed out the ADL’s noxious role, going back at least to its collaboration with apartheid South Africa’s intelligence services. A layer of right-wing Zionism in the diaspora, for example, denizens of R/Jewish on Reddit, are very angry. Former ADL leader Abraham Foxman was furious. ADL board members are in revolt while ADL boss and Musk pal Jonathan Greenblatt’s loyal staffers are defending Musk internally, claiming he was high on ketamine, but people aren’t buying it. Holocaust scholarship across the spectrum is aghast, and there are new accounts of Musk visiting Auschwitz and simply using it as a photo-op. Some of the anger flowing from Jewish spaces online constitute a seeming feeling of being gaslit to fear Anti-Zionists, when the enemies are obviously those who cover their Antisemitism with lip service to the state of Israel. How is the ADL to be trusted to produce research on the Proud Boys, Incels and so forth, when they enable the social forces that amplify and indeed encourage this human dust? This has been obvious to many of us for a long time of course, but it has become far clearer to a wide array of people.
After all, in recent years this is not the first time Musk has been given the benefit of the doubt by the ADL. They have had spats, indeed at times the ADL seemed to ostentatiously and theatrically attack him and X. Yet ADL’s bending of the knee even as he gallops around and supports the AFD in Germany may not be so simple as to curry favor, yet its effect is that of either minimizing the power of the far right or erasing Musk’s responsibility for the crimes that he is no doubt inspiring. The ADL’s current leadership’s Zionist chauvinism is even to the right of the mainstream among American Jews. It has provoked opposition from within, with even a former CIA officer and “extremism researcher”leaving in disgust over its dedicating the bulk of its resources toward Pro-Palestine protesters over the growth of actual and dangerous antisemitism, the likes of which is amplified and facilitated by the Goebbels-like Musk.
But you can’t heal the symptom without affecting the cause. Musk’s gesture, and even more, his snide laugh-emoji reaction to the ADL’s damage control (followed by cringe holocaust jokes) cannot be separated, either analytically or empirically from the newfound strength of the far right from above and indeed, from below. For fully red-pilled elements of what was once the “alt-right”, this is what appears perhaps to be a near utopian situation. With the exception of Rubio, who appears to be a normie but has strong ties to the neo-fascist right in Latin America, all of Trump’s appointees, including the openly white nationalist Hegseth, are on the far right. Trump 2.0 has constituted a far-right/hard-right and beyond united front in the United States. Beyond the borders, with the weakening of the Dugin crowd and Bannon’s traditionalists, the richest man in the world Musk has become the Daddy Warbucks of the far right. White nationalist P. Hegseth heads up the pentagon and the homeland security boss is the dog shooting Kristi Noem.
But let’s not forget, however, Elise Stefanek, the seemingly upright congress person who regularly amplifies the white supremacist and antisemitic “great replacement theory”, appointed as Trump’s minion at the United Nations. This is someone who paraded around like an opponent of antisemitism to browbeat university presidents about Palestine organizing. This is classic parlour trick politics. Stefanek is perhaps not as deeply enmeshed in the violent street-fighting right as some of her colleagues, but she is completely indulgent of them. Taking the genuine feelings of vulnerability from Jewish communities and diverting them from her allies who march in Charlottesville and elsewhere about how Jews will not replace them, and then instead divert their anxiety towards college kids and keffiyehs, Stefanek is unmistakably a cynical fascist enabler. Yet she is joined in attacking as vicious and dangerous antisemites the anti-genocide movement by the likes of Deborah Lipstadt, Biden’s outgoing special envoy for combating antisemitism. Lipstadt had already come to the defense of the ADL, after the ADL came to the defense of Musk. Netanyahu would soon follow.
Fresh off failing to condemn Musk’s Nazi salute, the disgraceful hack outgoing “antisemitism czar” Lipstadt compares white supremacists with Anti-Genocide student protesters in the New York Times. Like Trump after Charlottesville, she’s saying “there are good people on both sides”. She is putting Jews in danger. She is an enemy, akin to the Judenraat. She is a collaborator. Perhaps she once heroically challenged holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer David Irving in the British courts. Yet who will stand up to Lipstadt for her historical revisioning, intellectual gaslighting and putting Jewish people in danger? Even if you are someone who has a big problem with the encampments, even if for whatever reason, you oppose them – the Jewish community is split on them. There is no rational or plausible way to call them antisemitic. Have there been actions that have made students uncomfortable? Sure. That’s what university is for. Have there been individual acts, condemned by movement leaders, of saying dumb shit? Yep. The “socialism of fools” is alive and well even if good leftists – and certainly Palestine organizers – condemn it. No matter how much concern-trolling or good faith opposition one may hold, it is impossible to take seriously a fellow Jewish person who sees me as more of a threat than the Proud Boys, as is implied by the defender of Musk. That would be a statement of Q-Anon-like groupthink at best. So would refusing to be reflexive over who is on your side and will have your back when and if the shit hits the fan.
It should be more obvious than ever at this point – Palestine activists are – not – a danger to Jewish communities. Jewish communities need to see who their allies are. Protesters are often members of Jewish communities. This is why the likes of the disgraced ADL and Lipstadt, who was a very good scholar, align with the likes of Stefanek and the Anti-Soros conspiracists. A split or consensus breaking in Diaspora Jewry is considered more dangerous than bombing synagogues. Back in the late 90s, they could just call us “self hating Jews”. But now our numbers are far too great and even those who may profoundly disagree with us know that we are not a danger to our own communities. We are the ones who confront the Nazis and white supremacists who attack Jewish institutions and bomb synagogues. Indeed this element is using the present circumstances to spread confusion but let’s not forget that the Proud Boys and Neonazis actually attacked Palestine protesters, some of whom were Jewish, at UCLA. And locally, here in Toronto, the Jewish Defense League regularly works with the far right.
This is where the likes of Lipstadt and the ADL ignore actual antisemitism against Jewish organizers, and the broad use of Antisemitic tropes (EG, about George Soros) to attack Palestine encampments. Lipstadt effectively endorses these antisemitic attacks on Jewish activists by basically implying that anti-genocide protesters are more dangerous than the Proud Boys. And in turn, even more dangerous than Musk. Against the backdrop of the now ostensibly “Pro-Israel” Nazis in the AFD hosting Musk, a significant amount of the protesters attacked by German police are Jewish. Events are held to “discuss the new antisemitism” without a single Jew on a panel, while Jewish protesters outside are kept out. Even a ceremony to award the Hannah Arendt prize to Jewish journalist M. Gessen was cancelled after Gessen made the obvious comparison, made in the past by liberal Zionist icon Amos Oz, between Gaza and “a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany.”
This is especially ironic in that the philosopher Hannah Arendt herself, while someone with far from perfect politics, would without a doubt be called antisemitic right now, in spite of being a holocaust survivor. This, in turn, is what leads us back to the collaborator Lipstadt. In Lipstadt’s informative, if score-settling book on the Eichmann trial, she is caustic to the point of outright intellectual terrorism with regards to Arendt’s account of the trial. In particular, like the Jewish establishment in Arendt’s own time, engaging at all with the role of the Judenraat, the Jewish councils who out of fear, opportunism or misguided hope collaborated with the Nazis, was absolutely unacceptable to Lipstadt.
This is not a unique point within holocaust historiography, yet Lipstadt’s stance bears new examination in light of her defense of today’s Judenraat in waiting. Lipstadt’s book recycles the old canard that by castigating the Judenraat’s role as “sordid” and one of the darkest episode of the holocaustled to charges of “blaming the victim”, as if collaborators are at one with the victims that they sell down the river. Bandying about this or that personal motivation, Lipstadt’s standpoint replaces class analysis with anecdotal biography and moralism. In light of her disturbing and minimizing contextualization of the Judenraat, it is quite clear that if indeed Lipstadt sees the present period as one in which there is a threat of far-right and Neo-Nazi antisemitism, her response to it is to kowtow, minimize and hence empower. One can speculate about all sorts of bourgeois motivation, just as with the Judenraat, but there is no other explanation that could apply to those Jewish defenders of Elon Musk. Dark and Sordid, as Arendt says. Lipstadt, in the last instance is a shanda fur die goyim.
Jewish communities must see who their allies are. The ADL and Deborah Lipstadt are not your friend.
