Paper by DP for discussion on 5 June 2008

(see also write-up of group discussion)

Is there an antisemitic tendency that is getting a hearing and potential acceptance within the Palestinian solidarity movement? That is the question that we shall be looking at in this article.

The Palestinian solidarity movement has been subjected to a prolonged and ridiculous campaign of false accusations of racism and antisemitism by Zionists which has undoubtedly muddied the waters. For example there are those, the US Congress amongst others, who define antisemitism in a way that could include any criticisms of Israel. This is an absurd definition and it has the quite obvious malicious intent of demonising any criticism of Israel. Like the boy who cried wolf the continual use of false allegations makes it more difficult to deal with the real thing when it raises its ugly head. We should be clear that false allegations need to be vigorously rejected.

What is Antisemitism?

The definition of antisemitism on Wikipedia is “prejudice and hostility toward Jews as a group. The prejudice is usually characterized by a combination of religious, racial and ethnic biases. While the term’s etymology might suggest that antisemitism is directed against all Semitic peoples, since its creation it has been used exclusively to refer to hostility towards Jews”. That is fine but there is a rather unique and peculiar aspect of antisemitism which goes beyond hatred of Jews. Cohn, the author of Warrant for Genocide puts it like this: “the deadliest kind of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted genocide, has little to do with real conflicts of interest between living people, or even racial prejudice as such. At its heart lies the belief that Jews – all Jews everywhere – form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind”.

There has been antisemitism going back to the time of St Augustine – “Jews who once the favourite sons of God were transformed into sons of Satan. Moreover, the Jews were brought into relation with that fearsome figure, Anti-christ, the ‘son of perdition’, whose tyrannical reign, according to St Paul and the Book of Revelations, is to precede the second coming of Christ”. This biblical element of antisemitism is a recurring theme. Israel Shamir, the Swedish fascist who poses as an ex-Israeli Jew (his legal name is Adam Ermash – previously Joran Jermas), is an Evangelical Christian. Tony Gosling, another world conspiracy nut and the person behind the web site www .bilderberg.org has a page on his web site “The Biblical Tribulation – Twenty First Century End Times research and links”.

The Jewish World conspiracy theory however is not ancient. It can be located as a response to the French Revolution and the period of rapid change across Europe at that time that threatened the old aristocratic order. Groups like the Freemasons were seen as the evil conspirators behind the French Revolution. It couldn’t possibly be that the masses had by their own initiative been involved in the struggle to demand greater rights – to the reactionaries it had to be some dark, sinister and demonic forces at work. A veritable industry arose churning out works claiming to uncover the conspiracy, some said it was the Freemasons, others argued that it was the earlier Bavarian based Illuminati and some argued that it was the Jews or that the Freemasons were controlled by the Jews. These Judeo-Masonic conspiracy theories flourished, describing the situation in France in the 1890s Cohn writes:

When one reflects that France had been the first country to emancipate its Jews (in 1791) and that by 1890 French Jews were still a mere handful (less than 80,000), one can only marvel at the intensity of such hatred. And the antisemitioc fever that gripped France in the 1880s and 1890s had in fact practically nothing to do with contacts between individual non-Jewish Frenchmen and individual Jews. Talk of the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy found most belief in the provinces such as Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou and Poitou, where there were very few Jews; in Montdidier, where Chabauty published his newspaper L’Anti-Semeitiqu, there lived not a single Jew. What the Jew symbolized for this public was the mysterious power of Paris, where most Jews lived. Here again one sees how the latter-day revival of antisemitism expressed above all the protest of traditional, rural society against the forces of modernity.

(N Cohen, Warrant for Genocide (1966), p.50

 

However, it was not in France but in Czarist Russia where the antisemitic industry took off with official support from the ultra-reactionary Alexander III and his son Nicholas II. The czarist police took an active part in the forgery and production of documents that claimed to prove a world Jewish conspiracy -these included the so-called Rabbi’s Speech and the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. These works had the now familiar themes of a world government, of Jews secretly controlling the press, the banks and financial institutions such as the stock exchange, and of having agents inside all governments and institutions of power. The Protocols were in fact plagiarised from a French political parody written by Maurice Joly Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel.

The pogroms and the antisemitic campaigns led to Russian Jews emigrating at a rate of 100,000 a year – mostly to the USA during this period. Of course this was nothing as to what was to come later when the Nazis decided that the Final Solution was the way to deal with the world Jewish conspiracy – texts such as the Protocols were standard issue in Nazi schools.

Antisemitism – false allegations and exaggerated claims

No survey of the issue of antisemitism in the context of the modern movement in solidarity with the Palestinians would be complete without looking at the misuse of the term by the Zionist lobby. Perhaps the best known author on this subject is Norman Finkelstein. His book Beyond Chutzpah -On the Misuse of Anti-Semitism and the Abuse of History is a very valuable work on the subject. In essence the Zionist lobby cynical exploit and misuse the issue for the purpose of hyping up how dangerous it is for Jews to live anywhere but inside Israel and also they use the issue as a handy propaganda weapon with which they attempt to discredit the entire Palestinian solidarity movement. Finkelstein quite meticulously analyses the various reports into antisemitism – much of it is misreported and is not actually antisemitism at all. Also then the degree to which it is a problem is over hyped to the point of ridiculous. For example a centrepiece of the Manifestations report claiming a rise of the “new antisemitism” is about a poster protesting the impending visit of Bush to Berlin because the “well known picture of ‘Uncle Sam’ is showing a ‘typical Jewish nose’”. As Finkelstein points out the vast bulk of victims of racist attacks are Blacks and since 9/11 the Muslim community is without doubt the main sufferer of racism. Of course that is not to say that antisemitism no longer exists – today’s BNP are a point in question.

The BNP and antisemitism

Traditionally the fascist groups in Britain have all been virulently antisemitic. In recent years as part of its drive to be seen as being “respectable” the BNP under Nick Griffin has officially disowned antisemitism. Griffin many years ago had distributed holocaust denial material. As Griffin explains in his New Year message the main target now is Islam. Indeed, the BNP Now recognises and supports the state of Israel. Certainly the main propaganda put out by the BNP today is against the muslim community. In January 2007 Daniel Bullman, an activist in Swindon BNP, was jailed for a petrol bomb attack on the local Mosque. Bullman writes occasionally to Swindon anti-fascist Andy Newman, Andy writes “for reasons best known to himself, he regularly writes to me from prison, and when he was on remand and before he was arrested he used to regularly ring me. He is a virulent anti-semite and he explained that the reason he attacked the mosque is because there is no synagogue in Swindon, and a Mosque was (as he put it) close enough for public consumption”. http://www.socialistunity.com/?p=430

The Nazi Holocaust and The Holocaust Industry

Another book by Finkelstein that is worth reading is The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering. This is a very challenging and disturbing read. Of course Finkelstein has been accused of being a holocaust denier for this work. To be honest, I find that a rather distasteful accusation, given that his mother was a recipient of compensation from the German government for the years she spent in various camps.

Finkelstein differentiates between the Nazi Holocaust and The Holocaust (with capital letters) which he describes as being the ideological construct of the Holocaust Industry. Interestingly Finkelstein points out that in the US there was little interest in the subject in the 1950s and early 1960s. At that time the Jewish groups were not particularly vehemently pro-Israel and US foreign policy was fairly ambivalent towards Israel. He suggests that it was the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six-Days war and the victory in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War (Yom Kippu War) which led to a sea change in US foreign policy and attitude towards Israel. Basically Israel had proved itself to be a military power in the middle East and one that was a potential ally of US imperialist interests against Soviet interests. It is interesting here to note how this historical view contrasts with the notion of “Jewish Power” – that Jews control US foreign policy. Indeed, Finkelstein suggests that the honeymoon period of the two interests coinciding good indeed very rapidly diverge in the future.

Anyway, in this work Finkelstein makes a very closely argued case that The Holocaust industry have been indulging in a “double shake down” – exploiting the issue of the Holocaust to blackmail the Swiss authorities into parting in vast sums of money in compensation for those who had perished in the Holocaust and who had their assets in Swiss banks – yet at the same time *prevented* victims from actually individually receiving compensation. Compensation has gone to various educational and Jewish community causes including the cause of Israel over the years. This process has again include fabrication and lies. For example historians reckon that 5-6 million Jews perished in the Nazi Holocaust and that there were around 100,000 survivors – of whom less than one quarter would still be alive today. The Holocaust Industry has claimed inflated figures which could be argued would have meant 1 to 2 million Holocaust survivors. He suggests that this rewriting of history plays in to the hands of the holocaust revisionists.

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