We must not compromise in the fight against anti-semitism
Earlier this week I posted something on the subject of anti-Judaic and anti-Semitic prejudice. I want to return to the subject, because I have no doubt that prejudice against Jews is on the increase, and that, as Michael Rosen says, this is a form of bigotry which: “is seen by some in the liberation movements as a racism that doesn’t matter as much.”
In August 2006, Mark Bulman (pictured) attempted to burn down the Broad Street mosque in Swindon using a petrol bomb and has just been sentenced to five years in prison. Mark was the registered fund holder for Wiltshire BNP, and actively campaigned for the party in last year’s local council elections. Strangely Mark used to write to me while he was on remand, and even rang me a few times. He had left the BNP to form what he called the “1290 sect”, named after the year the Jews were expelled from England, and he wrote to me: “I only attacked the mosque because there is no synagogue in Swindon, and it was close enough for public consumption”. The fuse used for the fire bomb was a rolled up BNP leaflet.
Mark had previously been arrested for a racially aggravated public order offence at Swindon’ New College, along with Daniel Lake, who is now a student at Bath University, and I believe is the new leader of the YBNP.
Mark’s letters to me, which I have passed on to Searchlight, were filled with a virulent hatred of Jews, mixing up three themes. I) racialised anti-semitism; ii) Christian traditions; and iii) opposition to Israel’s War in the Lebanon, and the occupation of Palestine.
In September 2006, a parliamentary enquiry heard of a sharp increase of attacks on Jews since the war in Lebanon had started. The Times reported Mark Gardener of the Community Security Trust saying: “In July, when the conflict in Lebanon began, we received reports of 92 incidents, which was the third-worst month since records began in 1984.” In 2000 the monthly average was between 10 and 30 incidents. … The July incidents “were more dispersed than usual … It is usually a small number responsible for a large number of attacks, but these were very widespread across the country and included graffiti attacks on synagogues in Edinburgh and Glasgow. The attackers, when visible, are from across society, he said. “When it’s verbal abuse, it’s just ordinary people in the street, from middle-class women to working-class men. All colours and backgrounds. We hardly ever see incidents involving the classic neo-Nazi skinhead. Muslims are over-represented.” In hate-mail to senior Jewish figures, ordinary Jewish people were being blamed for the deaths of Lebanese civilians. “There are also references to the Holocaust, saying that Hitler should have wiped out the Jews.”
Over the last few years, as an activist campaigning against the Iraq and Afghan wars, I have several times been offered the explanation that the wars have been orchestrated by Jews, along with “revelations” that various members of the British government are Jewish. To fail to challenge this anti-Judaic prejudice, on the basis that islamophobia is a greater evil, is the anti-imperialism of fools.
If we are to challenge anti-Semitism and anti-Judaic feeling we need to understand the multi-stranded nature of the bigotry. We also need to understand that the ideology of Zionism contributes to anti-Semitism, and the actions of the Israeli state make the world a more dangerous place for Jews.
We should not ignore the deep well of anti-Judaic ideology within Christian culture The huge success of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of Christ” reveals the large audience for the traditional Christian interpretation of the Gospels, that the Jews killed Christ. In the Gospel of Matthew, the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate “took water, and washed his hands before the [Jewish] multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.” This may be a deeply unfashionable interpretation for trendy Anglicans, but it is believed by millions of Christians around the world. Indeed Mel Gibson was condemned simply for bringing the literal words of the Bible to a film-going audience.
In pre-Capitalist European culture, Christians were prohibited from usury – lending money for interest. Mediaeval Jewry therefore played a social role as bankers and financiers. The enduring stereotype of Jews as greedy therefore derives from Mediaeval opposition to finance capital. As Martin Luther wrote in 1543: “They let us work in the sweat of our brow to earn money and property while they sit behind the stove, idle away the time, fart, and roast pears. They stuff themselves, guzzle, and live in luxury and ease from our hard-earned goods. With their accursed usury they hold us and our property captive. Moreover, they mock and deride us because we work and let them play the role of lazy squires at our expense and in our land. Thus they are our masters and we are their servants, with our property, our sweat, and our labour.”
Martin Luther may have little direct influence on modern anti-Semitism, but the identification of Jews trying to control the world through finance capital still has widespread currency, and informs, for example the idea of a “Jewish lobby” that dictates American support for Israel.
It should be noted that neither the identification of Jews as Christ killers, nor the belief that there is a “Jewish lobby” can be identified as the new form of racism that speaks of cultural rather than racial differences. These are forms of anti-Judaic bigotry that pre-date racism, and are deeply embedded in European culture. To effectively challenge them requires that we recognise their origin, and specifically refute them in theoir own terms rather than confuse them as being identical with modern anti-semitism.
The 19th century saw anti-Judaic feeling given a gloss of pseudo-science, with the birth of this modern anti-semitism. This made an important difference because it created a racial category for the Jews. Previously Christian theology had disputed the claim of Jews to be a separate people. The Jews themselves regarded themselves as a nation without a home, but the Christians saw them as people who had rejected Christ. This was important for Christians as a refutation of the claim by Jews to be a favoured people by God. As Luther wrote: “If birth counts before God, I can claim to be just as noble as any Jew, … For I will not give it up and neither Abraham, David, prophets, apostles nor even an angel in heaven, shall deny me the right to boast that Noah, so far as physical birth or flesh and blood is concerned, is my true, natural ancestor, and that his wife (whoever she may have been) is my true, natural ancestress; for we are all descended, since the Deluge, from that one Noah.”
Mediaeval anti-Judaism regarded Jewishness as a question of faith, and a Jew who accepted Christ stopped being a Jew.( Indeed this was necessarily so, because the apostles were Jews who followed Christ.) Indeed the distinctive traditions of Hassidic Jews may have been adopted by the sect as a defence against their faith being lost by assimilation, in a similar way to Christian sects like the Amish. The concept of a secular Jew would have been a nonsense in Mediaeval Europe, whereas the Nazis slaughtered atheists and Christians who they regarded as being of Jewish race.
Through virtue of their alleged descent from a non-European linguistic stock the Jews became regarded as a race. The Zionists accepted this racialised identity. It is in this context that extreme modern anti-Semitism produced the idea of a Jewish conspiracy. It was also this context which saw the Zionists form a Jewish state, although Israel still has a problem deciding who is and who isn’t a Jew.
This brings us to the third source of anti-Judaic sentiment today, which is opposition to the actions of the Israeli state. Particularly in the Middle East there is deep anti-Judaic sentiment, and they have imported modern anti-Semitism from Europe. The notorious forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which “proves” the international conspiracy, is widely sold in the Arab world. The Iranian President Ahmadinejad hosted a recent conference in Tehran that denied the holocaust, and brought together assorted fruitcakes and Nazis, like David Duke.
Zionism started life as a strategy to escape anti-Semitism. Separatism has often been adopted by the oppressed, for example Marcus Garvey and the Black Train Home movement, or the Rastafarians. But through the existence of a Jewish state that systematically oppresses the Arab peoples, and through the acceptance by the Zionists of the need for racial separation, and the systematic identification of Israel with Jewishness, the Zionists are a major contributing factor to anti-Judaic feeling today.
But our opposition to Israel must not blind us to the rising tide of anti-Semitism, and the resurgence of older forms of anti-Judaic prejudice. Nor does it absolve the left of its responsibility to defend the Jews, we must never compromise our determined opposition to all forms of bigotry, even when challenging such bigotry is inconvenient.
I dleted a comment made here, becazsue it was longer than the original post, and was basicaly an advert for a book.
Comment by AN — 18 January, 2007 @ 7:21 pm
Zionism transformed Judaism to a race, there is a big difference between Jews and Zionists.
Prior to the Zionist deportations towards Palestine, the three Sects of Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived in Harmony, problem is that the Zionists formulated the de-stablilizing factor…
MFL
Comment by MarxistFromLebanon — 19 January, 2007 @ 2:11 pm
Of course there is a difference between Jews and Zionists. I accept that compleletely.
BUt I am not sure I agree with you entirely MFL. Zionists dis not create the idea of Jews as a race. They may however have introduced that idea into the Middle East - as you say - a destabilising factor.
The concept of the Jews as a nation (as opposed to a race) is intrinsic to religious Judaism.
The extension of that limited religious idea that those of Jewish faith were a nation to the idea that there is a separate Jewish race, did not derive from the Zionists but from anti-semites. Zionism starts life as a reaction to anti-semitism.
Comment by AN — 19 January, 2007 @ 2:35 pm
I notice that you use the term ‘anti-Judaic’ largely in place of ‘anti-semitism’ and that is very well thought out and accurate.
Today, by popular definition an “anti-semite” is anyone who disagrees with the Israelis unchecked slaughter of the displaced people they ousted when they arbitrarily declared their state. Anyone who points out that Jews have an undue and disproportional influence over the media and politics globally. Anyone who points out that invasion of Iraq and the planned attack on Iran benefit no one but Israel and it was they who planned and pushed for it, and they who are now pushing for a similar, possibly even nuclear attack on Iran as we speak.
Besides anything else it is a very inaccurate term because of reasons such as: large numbers of ‘Jews’, the Ashkenazi are really just Khazarian (Turkic peoples) converts to Judaism from around 1200 years ago and are not semitic at all; the Jewish and Arab languages are all semitic so to call Arabs “anti-semites” is ludicrous, etc. , etc.
Zionism and Judaism are two very separate entities, but it is Judaism’s insistence that they a race and a ‘chosen one’ at that that has made the Jews readily identifiable and so very easily persecuted in times of internal strife.
The Jews have consciously, in general, isolated themselves from their ‘host’ communities and have the appearance of working in league toward an exclusive benefit for themselves. That is the real cause of their misfortune.
It is well documented that Wall Street financiers, many Jews included gave inordinate sums and aid to the Nazi’s and it is entirely possible that the NSDAP would not have been able to progress so far without such assistance. The Rothschilds too have been linked to this, and many refused to believe it when the evidence was first presented.
The question as to why on earth any Jewish group could or would do this is the stumbling factor in grasping such historical realities.
But when one considers that the Rothschilds and the Zionists consider themselves to be true Semitic Jews and the Ashkenazi to be merely religious converts, and that the majority of the Jewish population of Europe composed of the latter, it is not to difficult to see the cynicism involved.
Israel was only formed by the popular horror of the Nazi’s odious ideology and subsequent actions.
With traditional duality, and with constant traditional machination, whilst financing the Nazi’s, the Zionist World Jewish Congress also declared war on Germany in 1933, thus placing the Germans in the same position that the British and Americans found themselves in when they interned the Japanese, Italian and German residents at the declaration of war.
Much of that era and its events are still to young to be analysed and comprehended fully.
Interestingly, the star of David has never really been associated with Judaism but was the Rothschilds family emblem. It also appears on every Masonic temple and has done long, long before it become the symbol of Israel.
Comment by The Sentinel — 19 January, 2007 @ 5:47 pm
The thing is Sentinel, that you yourself are mixing up the question of opposition to Israel along with a number of other very questionable arguments.
let there be no mistake I am opposed to both anti-semitism and anti-Judaic prejudice, in all its forms.
For example, your argument that: “Jews have an undue and disproportional influence over the media and politics globally” is really a rehash of theories of a Jewish conspiracy, and as such s a form of anti-Judiac prejudice. In my experience Italians are over-represtented in the carrer of male hairdressing in Britain, but so what?
Also I simply don’t acept that Zionists are opposed to the Ashkenazi. Indeed a popular description of the privilaged classes in Israel is WASPs, White Asheknazi Sons of the Pioneers.
I think some of your arguments here bundle together opposition to Zionism with some very dubious ideas that draw upon traditions of anti-Judaic prejudice.
Comment by AN — 19 January, 2007 @ 6:00 pm
Please excuse the spelling and presentation of the above comment, it was typed in a hurry.
Comment by The Sentinel — 19 January, 2007 @ 11:09 pm
Sentinel comes across as an anti-semite, which worries me. The basic thing is that European and North American culture and society owes an immeasurable debt to Jewish people. The politica left owes a huge debt to Jewish people who took part in the movement. The suggestion that there is something sinister about this is reprehensible. Now in the 20thC the most enormous crime was committed against Jewish people. As there are still people who try to deny this we have to be careful how we pose our arguments. And this also extends into how we deal with the fact that Zionism disposssessed the Palestinians and committed a terrible crime against them - and still commits crimes against them. And the fact that raising anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli positions leads to accusations of anti-Semitism. In this context lists of Jews looks bad.
Comment by badmatthew — 21 January, 2007 @ 1:54 pm
I am not ‘anti’ anyone, as I pointed out earlier.
The only ‘anti-semitism’ here is in your mind, not mine, and solely because you have chosen to judge me.
I am not on the political ‘left’ or ‘right’ and I certainly do not owe a huge debt to what I consider to be subversive elements and thinking.
I wonder if the Russians, of whom Communists murdered many, many millions, far more people then Hitler, are thankful to the Marxist, Jewish led take over of their country. Or the results of it. Along with dozens of other ‘great left’ movements that have bore nothing other then pain and suffering.
I focused on the US in the above comment because most the prominent political US Jews hold dual nationality with Israel, so where is their ultimate loyalty? Bearing in mind most are also prolific Jewish activists.
What is presented above is fact with minimal commentary, I note that you have no comment on Churchill’s contemporary analysis of the situation. Was he an ‘anti-semite’ also?
As for being careful how we pose our arguments, speak only for yourself. I do not have to be careful of anything in my own land, I have earned the right o speak freely and I will use that right.
I need make no deference to events that took place many years before my birth, in a land that is not mine and by organisations that bear no relation to me.
If you want to put yourself in a self-imposed prison be my guest but leave me out it. I will not be straitjacketed as to my choice of words or what I perceive as the truth, and you have absolutely no right to suggest I should.
Comment by The Sentinel — 21 January, 2007 @ 8:42 pm
Actually I think Winston Churchill was pretty anti-semitic in the way many of his class in that period were.
Sentinel’s self-justification and narcissistic self-praise looks even more symptomatic to me. ‘Sentinel’ against what, eh.
Comment by badmatthew — 21 January, 2007 @ 11:46 pm
I do not know why you even bothered with this comment. It is completely meaningless and baseless. I suppose it gave you the chance to slip in a bit of abuse.
I did not and would justify myself to you or anyone else. I have no need to. You, your thoughts and your opinions are entirely irrelevant to me. You are superfluous in the grand scheme of things; your way has been tried many times and failed just as many.
As for self-praise, where exactly? Like most people who stand on your fringe, you are completely detached from reality. You need to hear things that were not said because it is what your preconceived reality needs to reinforce your world.
You thrive on self-affirmation and react with all the fury that fear produces when someone dares to dissent.
You are the epitome of a hypocrite: seeing and citing ‘fascism’ in every person that does not conform to you and your view the world, placing labels upon them to demean their worth as both commentators and humans, and feeling the self-righteous need to bring them into line, indignant and furious you spew forth with abuse and insults (as a precursor to its logical extension of violence)
You cannot dispute facts as presented, so you try to warp them to fit your pre-printed song sheet and then reinforce your lack of reason by stereotyping.
You consider Churchill to be an ‘anti-semite’ because he spoke the truth, not because “way many of his class in that period were.” Those are just weasel words without foundation. He saw what was happening and he said it as he saw it.
It is the truth being verbalised you have a problem with, not the facts behind them that lead to such utterances. That is where your interest lies.
You are unable to answer any of the conundrums posed in my comments. I think, just below the surface, you know there is merit in such debate but the program is too strong: if you could, even possibly, be wrong about this, were could it all lead? Could it be that there are other things that are wrong in your world too?
Comment by The Sentinel — 22 January, 2007 @ 4:14 am
Sentinel.
Badmathew is not someone who accues everyine who disagree with him as a facsist Nor am I.
Your last posting was abusive, please do not post abuse on this blog.
I am concerened that this discussion started as a discussion on how anti- semitism and anti-Judaism can be understood in order that it can be combatted.
However, the debate with your self has taken it into a different directon. Of course it possible to find lists of jews in various realms of life. So what? the same can be said of any group? Look how many Scottish prople there have been in medicine, so what?
I am prepared to delete future comments in this thread that continue in this direction.
Comment by AN — 22 January, 2007 @ 12:24 pm
I have deleted a comment from the Sentinel becasue it contaned what i regard to be anti-semitic comment.
Comment by AN — 23 January, 2007 @ 7:47 pm
Interesting.
Your friend calls me a self-justifying, self-praising narcissistic ‘anti-Semite’ in lieu of a refutation and as deliberate means of abuse in order to demean me and my position, and I made an admittedly angry, but reasoned analysis of these comments, which you then find offensive, and abusive, but you do not understand how your friends comments could have been abusive or provocative.
Very interesting.
Comment by The Sentinel — 23 January, 2007 @ 8:58 pm
I’ve got to apologise to The Sentinel. Yes I am bad. I might even be Jewish! I didn’t refute him. I think his line of argument is anti-semitic. The methodology of listing the names of Jews in Bolshevism, business and politics and saying, ‘hey, look at the prepondenerence of Jews’ is core to the repertoire of anti-semitism. Why not list the blondes? What is the precise significance? But here’s the problem, the political project of anti-semitism is partly about getting the space for saying anti-semitic things. It’s always tempting to see how far and how deep the thing goes, and that sort of opportunity carries the danger of allowing this kind of racist posion to spread. WE’ve got a problem, there is genuine anti-semitism and Andy was right to point to it. But the accusation of anti-semitism is clearly used to block certain political arguments, especially over the historic injustice meted out to the Palestinians. It makes it easier if we disassociate from the anti-semites, or people who say anti-semitic things. So I’m sorry if I read The Sentinel wrong, but his argument still looks anti-semitic to me. And as we are still discussing his self-justifications I stick to my view. So Sentinel make it clear just why and how you’re not anti-semitic, or kindly buzz off.
Comment by badmatthew — 24 January, 2007 @ 8:59 am
I’m sorry Sentinel, but i will continue to delete comments that include content that shares a common agenda with anti-semitism.
This is not censorship, it is editorial control.
Comment by AN — 24 January, 2007 @ 3:54 pm
All rather pointless on this one: Editorial control or censorship-its all semantics.
An opinion deleted is an opinion destroyed.
One famous commentator of the Third Reich once said, in reference to the may 10th 1933 incident in Opernplatz “When one burns books, one ultimately burns people.”
The same can be said for destroying opinions.
Comment by The Sentinel — 26 January, 2007 @ 5:12 am
As the pastor of an evangelical christian church, let me highlight the fact that the position of the New Testament regarding the Jewish people is that christians owe a great debt to the Jews - see Romans chapters 2,9,11 for example. The Jews are the ancient Olive tree to which we as gentile (goyim) believers in J’shua HaMaschiach have been grafted in.
I do not deny that there have been times in history when anti-semitism has reared its very ugly head even in the name of christianity - but all too often it has been ‘christianity’ in name only, not in truth.
God has not forsaken his ancient promises to his ancient people. I believe this because this is taught in the Tanakh and in the New Testament. I love the Jewish people because my best friend happens to be Jewish - His name is Jesus.
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