Tony Greenstein
When the incitement to religious hatred bill was laid before parliament two years ago, numerous figures from the media and entertainment industries, as well as the human rights, humanist and civil liberties lobbies, condemned the legislation as an attack on free speech. In the words of the actor Stephen Fry, the legislation was "a sop to the Muslim community", whose problems really centred around race, not religion.
Yet barely a murmur has greeted the report of the all parliamentary inquiry into anti-semitism, chaired by the rightwing Labour MP Denis MacShane, who in a previous life as a junior Foreign Office minister greeted the CIA coup that temporarily overthrew Hugo Chávez of Venezuela by denouncing the latter as "a ranting, populist demagogue" (Hugh O'Shaughnessy, March 12 2007).
The committee itself had no status when it drew up the report. It was self-selecting, and not one of the 14 members of the inquiry voted against the war in Iraq on March 18 2003. In other words, they came to the question of anti-semitism from a rightwing political perspective.
Yet the report on anti-semitism, which the government has accepted by upgrading the committee's status to that of a select committee (Jewish Chronicle, March 30 2007: "Police told to focus on hate crime"), is deeply disturbing in its cavalier approach to the definition of anti-semitism, which it conflates throughout with anti-Zionism.
Even the basis for the report itself is hyped and unconvincing. By the reports own' admission (paragraph 29), the year 2005 saw a fall of 14% in recorded anti-semitic incidents compared with the previous year. Of course each and every incident is to be condemned, but where, one might ask, is the all-parliamentary committee on incidents of anti-Muslim abuse; and what, one wonders, would be the level of recorded incidents?
What is more worrying is how anti-semitic incidents are defined. In Brighton and Hove there were two demonstrations against the Lebanon war last summer. Police from Sussex and Surrey swamped the second demonstration, alleging a "serious racial incident" had occurred.
The incident concerned a motorist who had yelled "terrorist" at an Arab demonstrator on the previous march and got into a verbal altercation as a result. Despite a number of eyewitnesses, the police made no attempt to investigate the alleged crime. Instead, it was used as a pretext for some of the heaviest policing of a demonstration, including the use of racial profiling against Arabs, that I have ever seen. It has taken a six-month campaign for Brighton police to accept that the right to demonstrate is not a privilege handed down from on high.
In the course of a conversation I secretly recorded, Brighton's chief of police, Kevin Moore, admitted that before the demonstration, "We made contact with the local Jewish community leaders within the synagogues." In other words, it was the police who made the association between the bombing of Lebanon and the local Jewish community. And in an equally revealing remark, Moore let slip that the police had received a single complaint about the march and, because a "racially motivated incident is one which is declared by any person to be racially motivated", had therefore classified the march as anti-semitic!
The inquiry report is part of a continuum that began with the creation of an offence of "glorifying" terrorism and is continuing with the suggestion that anti-Zionism - that is, opposition to the Israeli state and the movement it created - is anti-semitic. Ironically, it is repeating one of the oldest anti-semitic myths: adopting the EU's working definition of anti-semitism, the report states that anti-semitism includes "denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, eg by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavour".
Yet it has long been an article of faith among anti-semites that Jews, wherever they lived and whatever they did, formed a nation separate from those they lived among. The major difference between modern and feudal anti-semitism was that the Jews were seen not as a religion but as a race or nation. It is one of the hallmarks of New Labour that contested political arguments are now being resolved by the criminal law.
And then there is the suggestion that to criticise the nature of the Israeli state, which is unique in defining itself as a state not of its own citizens but of Jews worldwide, is to apply "double standards by requiring of it a behaviour not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation". This is the argument that supporters of apartheid in South Africa used to make. States that accord privileges based on racial/ethnic criteria are indeed unique.
It is argued that "drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis" is in itself anti-semitic. Now, it might arguably be offensive, but why anti-semitic? In her book The War Against the Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz reports that it was the position of the SS that "the Zionists adhere to a strict racial position, and by emigrating to Palestine they are helping to build their own Jewish state". Is it anti-semitic to point out that "ethnic cleansing" and the transfer or forced migration of civilian populations was also Nazi policy; or that only in Israel and Nazi Germany were Jews barred from marrying non-Jews?
And it is supporters of the Israeli state itself who have regularly made comparisons between the Palestinians and the Nazis. Who can forget when in 1982 the Israeli premier Menachem Begin compared Arafat in the siege of Beirut to Hitler in his bunker? How many times has the Holocaust been used to justify the Israeli state?
The report defines anti-semitism as "holding Jews collectively responsible for actions of the state of Israel". Agreed. But is it any wonder that there are some misguided people who criticise the Board of Deputies of British Jews when it holds rallies in the name of the Jewish community in support of Israel's bombing of Lebanon?
This report has nothing to do with anti-semitism and everything to do with creating a rightwing political agenda whereby opposition to British and US foreign policy is deemed anti-semitic. If Israel is the west's principal strategic partner in the Middle East and you question the whole basis of that partnership, then you will inevitably be criticised as anti-semitic. In the United States, it has even been argued that if you oppose the majority positions of the Jewish community in favour of the Iraq war, that makes you anti-semitic.
The all-party parliamentary inquiry made no attempt to interview a broad cross-section of Jews, including anti-Zionists; it played softball with the Jewish establishment. Nor did it seek the views of Jews who have been active in the fight against the BNP and National Front apart from those of the pro-Zionist Searchlight magazine. Instead what it has done is produce a report whose only purpose is to try and criminalise political debate in the name of "anti-semitism".
Tony Greenstein is a founding member of Palestine Solidarity Campaign and a member of Jews Against Zionism.
4 comments:
Time to Stop ... Period
While Greenstein's points are well-taken, it's time to stop employing the term 'anti-Semitism' to refer to one group only. While it may have been true that 'anti-Semitism' was indeed accurate at its inception -- when Hebraicists were the only representatives of 'Semite' in Europe (the Jews and Moors evicted and the Ottomans having been stopped at the gates of Vienna), the term is now applicable to ALL Semites (or to those, more appropriately who are against any portion of them for some reason), ALL of whom lay claim to the history and genetic origins, including the Arabs and a few other factions of Middle Eastern descent.
As is well-known but poorly publicised, 'Semites' are the descendents of Noah's son Sem.* Inasmuch as the term 'anti-Semite' is a European construct, it was thereby exclusive to the residents of Europe when made up, exclusive of those who lived elsewhere. Unfortunately, the populations are no longer distinct, their having been conflated themselves with the rise of Zionism and other immigrations to Europe by those who had been previously had no access thereto. The English, in their infinite abysmality, facilitated imperial conquests that naturally came to cause the dispersion of peoples, back to the Middle East and toward Europe of Semites in all of their variations.
We have to understand and conclude that 'anti-Semitism' once was a concept directed toward one group and is now actually focussed (but unstated) on many groups. What began as a discriminating factor among the Europeans has since been exported with the likes of the Zionists back to the land of Sem, aimed at those who have an unbroken history of being 'Semites' in their native homelands.
The English conquest of Arabia was one example of 'anti-Semitism,' with Palestine having assumed a greater importance in the last century because of the mythology that has been there centred. Further encroachments by Europeans have fostered even greater animosity against the long-term indigenous, providing a breeding ground for the germination of a more viscious kind of 'anti-Semitism,' one that has extended the English-inspired imperialism based on some 'right of return,' again mythologically based and biased, to some notion of superiority and right of dominion, perhaps Biblically inspired.
Of course, the establishment of a Zionist entity or enclave allowed the removal of the 'Semites' from Europe, a sort of politically instigated ethnic cleansing. To effect this, others and their stories had to be scrubbed from history, a kind of tit-for-tat or tidal action. Just as the Hebraicists had been caused to learn that their groups and societies were unimportant in Europe, this was transferred to the Arabs and others in the region, a kind of kinetic retribution by those who once considered themselves innocent against others who were truly guiltless of the what befell their cousin 'Semites' of Europe expatriation. When there's an axe to wield, any convenient heads will do.
Continued ignoring of the relationship of European acquired and inspired attitudes with the tendency to beginning Crusades and other incursions on Arabian lands portends continued hostilities. The very true 'anti-Semitism' is being practiced in all of its European intensity against the Palestinians but with the unusual twist of concentrating it on the native and historic dwellers of the lands thereabouts rather than on relative newcomers. Unfortunately, the Arabs have been, again, used as the pummelling bags for the ire and hatred of those who were unsuccessfully integrated into Europe, the Palestinians merely surrogates for centuries of pent-up vengeance. The Arabs had little or nothing to do with the genesis of the ill-will, most of which was caused much earlier in history in other parts of the World by Romanised peoples who adopted the 'Christ' mythology.
It's time to stop restricting the words to some nebulous condition when those who complain most loudly are perhaps shielding their own complicity and guilt, employing the complexity of their guile to obscure the realities as they have come to exist. As we've seen, overlaying European concepts and values (good and bad) on foreign lands has been largely unsuccessful. As with any product or service, acceptance or rejection is determined by popularity, or the lack thereof. Until what the Europeans have to offer, in terms of their cast-off populations or governments or cultures, are deemed of positive value, forcing them and the issues in a totalitarian manner is doomed to failure, increasing rejection to the point of revulsion and repulsion. Without any doubt, 'anti-Semitism' has not been popular with any of the groups against whom it has been used. When it inspires same-group abuses, it is appropriate to step in an separate the parties. It's time to stop the word's and concept's recycling onto those who are increasingly undeserving. Because a person had a bad upbringing doesn't mean someone else's kids have to suffer. The long-lost relatives might be welcomed but their welcomes are quickly worn out should they expect more than they deserve.
* http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/13706a.htm
Well hello, is it the same Tony Greenstein who has been pursuing Gilad Atzmon - the brilliant Israeli emigre philosospher, as outlined in this exchange:
http://peacepalestine.blogspot.com/2005/06/gilad-atzmon-tony-greenstein-debate.html
Greenstein the 'anti-Zionist' opinion-minder of the British pro-Palestine movement?
We don't need you to gatekeep our ideology, thanks Tony.
What a cheek!
Thanks for pointing this out. I'd forgotten.
I agree with Tony's main point here.
I'd appreciate a critical review of the article.
Best.
Thanks for the commentary, Alamaine.
Anti-semitism' is a construct, as you may agree.
With any other ethnic group the proper term is racism.
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