Brian Goldfarb on conspiracy theory.

Why write an article on conspiracy theory? Hopefully, that will become clear as this article unfolds, but, basically, because so many members and supporters of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanction (BDS) movement indulge themselves in a variety of conspiracy theorists.

So, how am I to use the notion of conspiracy theory? It’s easy enough to decide what it isn’t: it isn’t outright fabrications such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, produced by the Tsarist secret police in the late 19th Century in the full knowledge that they were telling lies. It isn’t the tendentious rubbish (even if based vaguely on a truism) produced by someone like Tom Hickey as a superficial justification for an academic boycott of Israel (but more of that later). Rather, it is the decision to assign the cause of some event or events to a person or group of people without resorting to seeking evidence of a link between the event(s) and the people blamed. It follows that there is no process of considering evidence, weighing the likelihood of this evidence actually demonstrating a link between event and people, and it further follows that no process of logical thought is employed anywhere in this sequence (even if something vaguely resembling the process known as “thinking” appears to have taken place).

The advantage for the believer of a conspiracy theory is that it saves them having to think, reason and seek facts and other forms of evidence to support their previously arrived at conclusion, as just argued. Any efforts made to introduce logic and reason by those of the rest of us who prefer evidence to assumption and argument to assertion tend to be met with statements along the lines of “well, that’s what ‘they’ want you to believe”. As the Observer reviewer of David Aaronovitch’s book “Voodoo History” put it, “you might not want to be trapped in a lift with the Duke of Edinburgh, but that doesn’t mean he murdered his daughter-in-law.” Regrettably, no amount of cast-iron evidence (sufficient, note, to convince even the most paranoid of intelligence officers) that Prince Philip was a thousand miles away at the time of Princess Diana’s death and, anyway, hasn’t talked to anyone in intelligence circles or even anyone who might have the slightest contact with such circles in several decades, will convince anyone who believes otherwise and will merely elicit the response already noted above about what “they” want you to believe.

Conspiracy theories are comforting, for all the reasons already given. They are a blanket, keeping the cold light of rationality away from the believer. This matters little (other than to those immediately affected, such as family, friends, etc) when the conspiracy concerns whether or not Princess Diana was “targeted” by the (or a) secret service. It matters a little (though at this distance in time not that much) more when there is still speculation, 46 years and several investigations later, as to whether Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone, mentally unstable, assassin (or was there a second, or a third, shooter on the “grassy knoll” – Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists know exactly what this is all about), or whether Oswald was wound up and set off by…who? The CIA? The Mafia? The KGB?

However, it is far more worrying, and potentially dangerous, when conspiracy theory reaches out to embrace as the villains whole groups of easily identifiable people, such as the Jews, the Moslems, the Blacks, homosexuals, gypsies…

And this is what we are facing here on Engage and in similar forums, in the real world, when conspiracy theory as to the cause of all “our” ills is made concrete with the threats to boycott Israeli universities and Israeli goods, and with threats (and actual occurrences) of attacks on Jews world-wide for the alleged sins of Israel. This becomes ever clearer every time those who are members of the BDS movement and others of their ilk post here. No matter how often and how strongly they are asked for evidence to support their claims (assertions, in actuality) that Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto, that genocide is being committed on the West Bank, they merely repeat these assertions (possibly in different words, but it is still repetition) as though this was evidence. They may introduce new topics and assertions, as though this is evidence (perhaps they believe it is) or possibly to distract us. Eventually, they go away, for the time being (unless I’m maligning the moderators, who get tired of reading such repetitive material and decide not to reproduce it).

Occasionally, it dawns on one or other of these people what is being requested of them. One such person (let’s call them “Z”), some months back, actually asked me where they might find the evidence I kept demanding of them. I pointed out to them (quite gently, I thought) that as it was “Z” who was trying to get us to change our minds, they were the one who was under an obligation to find it for themself: I certainly wasn’t going to, especially as I was and am dubious that such evidence actually exists. I may be being too hard on “Z”: “Z” did appear, at least some of the time, to want to understand the arguments, not just assert a contrary view and maybe there was a misunderstanding as to what was being asked of them, not just about evidence, but also about the rules of debate.

However, “Z” appears to be an exception. Consider, for example, Tom Hickey, UCU member, (still) elected to its Council and prime exemplar of conspiracy theory. When “debating” the question of a boycott of Israeli universities in the pages of the online version of the British Medical Journal, 27 July, 2007, he wrote (in response to a self-posed question, why boycott Israeli and only Israeli universities): “And we are speaking of a culture, both in Israel and in the long history of the Jewish diaspora, in which education and scholarship are held in high regard. That is why an academic boycott might have a desirable political effect in Israel, an effect that might not be expected elsewhere.” This is where the basis of a vague truism referred to in the first paragraph comes in: it is true that Jews, generally, venerate formal education. But so do vast swathes of the rest of humanity: not many parents declare, hand on heart, that they wish their and everyone else’s children to be ignorant, or at least no better educated than themselves and others like them.

But what is notable here is that Israel and Jews are conflated as though they are one (which is, in itself, an antisemitic attitude), and no other regimes which might conceivably upset Hickey and his fellow believers care anything like as much (if at all) about education as Israelis and Jews (so much for the Chinese, Saudis, Syrians, Sudanese, Zimbabweans, et al): arguably, a racist view. And why should he care about Israel and Jews? Well, he and his fellow boycotters are frequently equating Gaza with the Warsaw Ghetto; claiming Israel is committing genocide on the West Bank and/or in Gaza; is starving the Gazan Palestinians to death; stole Palestine from its previous inhabitants – all with nothing that would pass for evidence in the hallowed halls of the academe of which he and many like him are members, and only passes muster as a real argument in the fevered minds of the members of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, the Socialist Workers Party, Jews for Justice for Palestinians, JBIG and all the other components of the BDS movement. And all of them, of course, dismiss, or more likely just ignore (“well, that’s they want you to believe, isn’t it?”) all evidence to the contrary. Evidence such as the Palestinian refugee population increasing seven-fold in 60 years (some “genocide”), that the standard of living of the population of Gaza is no lower now than when the Israelis occupied it, or that no-one has found any evidence for mass graves on the West Bank.

And this is a resort to a conspiracy theory on a massive scale: Israel must be punished for what is happening in Gaza and on the West Bank. Further, no reference must be made to the ideologies of Hamas and Hezbollah; no examination of the actual history of the area the Romans, after the last revolt of the Jews against their rule, renamed “Palestina”; no consideration of the opposition of Palestinians to legitimate settlement by Jews in the Turkish-ruled Palestine; no thought as to the unprovoked violence showed by Palestinians towards Jews in the Palestine of the British Mandate; no study of the repeated rejection by Palestinians and their Arab backers of the United Nations, and later, plans for two states. None of this, because this would demand thought, reflection, logic, open argument: all the hallmarks of rationality and the intellectual process.

Rather, the whole BDS movement prefers to keep the blanket of conspiracy theory around itself and talk, in effect, only to each other: after all, the bright light of rational discourse can only hurt the eyes of the true believer.

So what are we to do in the face of this massive example of anti-intellectualism? In the immortal words of Winston Churchill during World War 2, “keep buggering on”. Not to do so is to surrender the pass to the barbarians. Anyway, it’s not them we’re talking to: it’s those seeking evidence and arguments to confront their own local conspiracy theorists and those not yet convinced either way, but open to evidence, argument and rationality. Whatever we do, we mustn’t let conspiracy theory and irrationality rule the debate or allow those who prefer not to think to get away with not thinking, and by so doing, think that they have “won”.

And by the way, if anything I have said makes anyone who posts comments (or whose bon mots get reported) here feels that I’m talking to them, well, if the cap fits, wear it (but hardly with pride!).

CST Antisemitic Discourse Report 2008

Dave Rich from the CST writes :

CST has long been known for recording and analysing antisemitic hate crimes: the physical assaults, desecrations, racist abuse and hate mail that make up a quantifiable measure of antisemitism. But just as, in recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that antisemitism is not restricted to the activities of street thugs and bar room racists, so it has become necessary to chart that other sort of antisemitism: the ideas, images and language that occasionally pollutes public discourse.

Read the whole piece Here.

Download the full report Here.

Understanding and Addressing ‘The Nazi card’

The European Institute For The Study Of Contemporary Antisemitism has a new report out Understanding and Addressing ‘The Nazi card’.

Read Winston Picket Let’s use the law to halt these Nazi slurs in the Jewish Chronicle.

The Guardian production of Caryl Churchill’s Antisemitic Play

Here.

Howard Jacobson’s critique is here.

Antony Lerman, Jacqueline Rose and David Hirsh

David Hirsh had this piece published in the Jewish Chronicle which criticized Antony Lerman, Jacqueline Rose and Caryl Churchill’s parallel projects to portray Jews as being psychologically incapable of forging good relations with their neighbours in the Middle East.  Their approach explains the war in Gaza by reference to the allegation that Jews bring up their children in a neurotic way, and in a way which teaches them to be unconcerned by Palestinian  suffering.

Some of these issues are explored in greater depth in these exchanges.

Antony Lerman and Jacqueline Rose had a letter published in last week’s Jewish Chronicle and David Hirsh responded this week:

Antony Lerman and Jacqueline Rose:

David Hirsh (“Do not confine Israel to the couch”, April 10th) performs the double feat of misrepresenting our views and showing his ignorance.

Jacqueline Rose neither inspired Caryl Churchill to write the play “Seven Jewish Children” – Churchill has not read her work – nor did she brief the actors. She was invited to talk to them about the history of the conflict.

Antony Lerman did not offer his own view of Professor Bar Tal’s research in his “Independent” article but quoted from the “Haaretz” summary of it; nor does he say or believe that it is a scientific discovery to assert that “the Jewish public does not want to be concerned with the facts”. Nowhere do we imply that Jews indoctrinate their children to be indifferent to non-Jewish suffering or that the Holocaust explains the attack on Gaza.

We do not transform political questions into psychological diagnoses. Nor are we practising therapy on anyone. Jacqueline Rose’s writing is rather based on the premise that there is a psychological dimension to all political conflicts that merits the most serious attention. The idea that there is a disjunction between psychology and politics (or between psychological and political explanations of human behaviour) is so ludicrous that no one who thinks this can be taken seriously as a social scientist. Is Professor Bar Tal wrong to be deeply concerned about the political implications of his research into the psychology and “collective memory” of Israeli Jews? Perhaps Hirsh thinks that the International Society of Political Psychology is based on a false premise.

Sadly, Hirsh is so incapable of engaging with our ideas that he invents some which he then ascribes to us. He then resorts to the odious ploy of implying that these fictitious views bear resemblance to those of David Irving and President Ahmadinejad. Surely your readers deserve better than this shoddy tactic from someone who purports to be an academic.

Antony Lerman, Jacqueline Rose

David Hirsh’s response:

It is hurtful but no longer surprising that Jacqueline Rose, a professor at my own university, and Antony Lerman, have responded to my arguments only with ad hominem attacks. They accuse me of misrepresentation, of ignorance, of holding a view “so ludicrous that no one who thinks this can be taken seriously as a social scientist”; of being incapable of engaging with their ideas; of only purporting to be an academic.

JC readers who have heard that discussion of antisemitism on campus is not always rational, have now seen for themselves an example of how those of us who take the issue seriously are often dealt with by colleagues who cannot bear to see their own words reported back to them.

If people read Lerman’s piece in The Independent, Rose’s books and Churchill’s play, they will see for themselves that I have misrepresented nothing.

The issue which Rose and Lerman seek to avoid is antisemitism. The campaign to exclude Israelis from the academic, cultural, sporting and economic life of humanity flows from the way of thinking which Rose and Lerman fight for. Rose works for the exclusion of Israeli colleagues, but no others, from UK universities. Lerman legitimizes the antisemitic demonization of Israel by blurring the distinction between this and political criticism of the policies of Israeli governments.

Rose and Lerman do not answer my points concerning the way they single out Jews as having a pathological inability to live at peace with their neighbours. They leave untouched my criticism of their psychological explanation, which essentializes the conflict as a Jewish neurosis. Rather, we should treat it as a political problem for which we can strive to find political solutions.

Rose and Lerman are fond of speaking “as Jews”. The effect of their project is to reassure the British intelligentsia that antisemitism is not currently an issue about which we need to be seriously concerned. This reassurance, doggedly and consistently offered, is dangerous because it educates anti-racists to recognize claims of antisemitism only as manifestations of dishonest pro-Israel propaganda. We should support the Israeli and Palestinian peace movements but we must never think that working for reconciliation is incompatible with vigilance about antisemitism.

Given that all too often people come up with homespun and offensive psychology to explain why some Jews side with antisemites against Jews, Howard Cooper’s response, which was to psychologize David Hirsh, was rather daring:

David Hirsh doesn’t agree with bringing psychological insights to bear on”political questions”. So he ends up aligning Professor Jacqueline Rose’s nuanced, psychoanalytically informed critiques of Israeli intransigence, and Antony Lerman’s remarks on the phenomenon of Jewish belligerency and sense of victimhood, with David Irving’s “antisemitic” stereotyping. Perhaps Hirsh’s ugly distortion of their positions demands its own analysis.

He suggests that “we expect our therapist to be on our side”, but the problem for any therapist is: what if the patient is in denial? If the patient cannot see his or her own aggressiveness, he or see will often experience the therapist’s comments as persecutory.

Further, the patient may twist the therapist’s words into a perverse parody of what has been said: thus Hirsh’s egregious allegation that Rose and Lerman “imply that Jews indoctrinate their children to be indifferent to non-Jewish suffering”.

These distortions occur when patients fear looking honestly at their own
failures and come up with thoughts like “It is not ‘the Jews’ but the occupation which is oppressive” – a remark indicating a typical wish to shift responsibility away from the personal to the impersonal “context”.

Of course Hirsh is right that the issues of post-Holocaust Jewish attitudes involve political questions. But to divorce politics from an examination of the deep subjectivities that inform any political position is both naive andintellectually flawed.

(Rabbi) Howard Cooper

For more on Jacqueline Rose’s work, people should re-read the exchange in Democratiya between Rose and Shalom Lappin.  Lappin reviewed The Question of Zion.  Rose responded.  Lappin answered.

See also this from Ben Gidley.

Do not confine Jews to the couch – David Hirsh

This piece, by David Hirsh, is from the Jewish Chronicle.

Jewish intellectuals who criticise Israel in psychological terms are wrong-headed

A therapist guides us on a journey to the frightening places inside ourselves and helps us to find ways to live with our demons. While we might do well to examine our own crazinesses with our therapists, we do not expect to have to answer for them in public and we expect our therapist to be on our side. Philosopher Michel Foucault warned that the sciences of the mind are also techniques of power and they have hostile as well as healing potential.

Jacqueline Rose, a professor at London University, argues in her book, A Question of Zion, that Israel should be understood psychoanalytically. She says the trauma resulting from the Holocaust is the root cause of the difficulty Israelis seem to have in living peacefully with their neighbours. Recently, she inspired Caryl Churchill to write the play Seven Jewish Children, which portrays Jews bringing up their children in a neurotic, dishonest and dysfunctional way and which many have said is antisemitic. Rose herself briefed the actors at the theatre.

In The Independent last month, Antony Lerman, former director of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research, also used psychology to explain current events, offering his own version of what Israeli psychologist Daniel Bar Tal reports about Israeli Jews. Lerman cheekily extrapolates the results to apply to British Jews. The consciousness of Jews “is characterised by a sense of victimisation, a siege mentality, blind patriotism, belligerence, self-righteousness, dehumanisation of the Palestinians and insensitivity to their suffering”. Lerman believes it to be a scientific discovery that “the Jewish public does not want to be confused with the facts.”

Yuck, I’m beginning to dislike these Jews already. If this collection of stereotypes came from David Irving, we would doubtless dismiss it as antisemitism.

I think critics of Israeli policies should make their arguments politically and with reasons. They should avoid ascribing to Jews collectively a pathological inability to act rationally. Israel is a state and acts according to what its leaders and its electorate calculate to be its national interest. Israel may be wrong. It may even be very wrong. But making peace with its neighbours is a matter for politics, not for therapy.

These three intellectuals all imply that Jews indoctrinate their children to be indifferent to non-Jewish suffering and that this is the key factor explaining Israel’s attack on targets in Gaza and on the civilians near them.

Leaving aside his cod-psychology, Lerman offers two arguments. One, with which I agree, is that the Israeli project of settling the West Bank is wrong, morally and pragmatically. His other is that Jews should stop saying that criticism of the occupation is antisemitic. Actually, Jews do not often raise the issue of antisemitism to de-legitimise criticism of Israel, not because they support the settlements, nor because they are psychologically damaged. The usual reason for Jews to raise the issue of antisemitism is that they are concerned about antisemitism, even when it resembles criticism of Israel.

Meanwhile, in her book, Rose argues that Zionism was from the beginning less a political movement than a messianic one; not rational but more like a religion. The Holocaust, she thinks, rendered Zionists even more irrational. And, after Gaza, she asked how the most persecuted people in history became “violent oppressors”.

If we heard President Ahmadinejad call Jews “violent oppressors”, we would surely respond by saying that it is not “the Jews” but the occupation which is oppressive. We would contextualise the conflict historically and say that neither “the Jews” nor Israel are more psychologically prone to oppressiveness than anyone else.

Leaving aside the vile implication that the Jews are the new Nazis, the idea that Jews should know better after the Holocaust is astonishing. Auschwitz was not a positive learning experience. Many Jews, traumatised perhaps, but not necessarily either mad or bad, learnt that it would be better to have a state and an army with which they could defend themselves if need be.

But Rose thinks that the Jews’ inability to put the trauma behind them in a psychologically healthy way explains Israel’s attack on Gaza. She does not explain how “Germans” have been able so successfully to recover psychologically from their part in the Holocaust and to build a peaceful and multicultural society. Can we congratulate post-national Europeans for having learnt the lessons of Auschwitz while we berate “the Jews” for having failed to do so? And how have Rose and Lerman themselves emerged so healthily from the traumatic family history which so damaged the rest of us?

Anthony Julius has shown that there is a long tradition of antisemites using Jewish witnesses against “the Jews”. Rose and Lerman’s allegations about how Jews indoctrinate their children are reminiscent of this insider testimony. But the problem is not that they speak publicly; the problem is that they transform political questions into psychological diagnoses.

David Hirsh

David Hirsh is a lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths and the editor of Engage, at www.EngageOnline.org.uk. His ‘Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism: Cosmopolitan Reflections’ is downloadable from the website of the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism

This piece, by David Hirsh, is from the Jewish Chronicle.

Geras on the Israel/Nazi analogy

“…Nazi-analogy critics don’t generally apply their favoured analogy elsewhere than in the Israeli case, they don’t often use potentially apt comparisons between Israel and other cases that would be less hateful to Jews, and they use the analogy precisely to magnify the parallels and minimize the discrepancies between Israel and Nazism. I submit, therefore, that there are strong grounds for seeing a certain malice in use of the analogy, and as this malice is aimed specifically, aimed by the very particularity of its shape, at Jews, it is hard to know what else to call it but anti-Semitism.”

Read the whole piece on Normblog.

Chris of Cafe Crema responds

Chris: "Israel needs to think about why so much of the world is against it..."

The owner of the café near Goldsmiths which has decided to boycott Israeli (and only Israeli) goods has responded on BobFromBrockley to this debate as follows:

Fair enough, I can now see that it was a mistake to write ‘Jews are as welcome here as anyone else’ in that it has been taken, by many people, in exactly the opposite way that it was intended (but perhaps I should have foreseen that – I apologise). Obviously, whilst writing anything about boycotting Israel (I’ll come to that in a bit) I wanted to also state what is obvious to me: that that doesn’t mean we’re anti-Semitic. I only felt that needed stating because certain people (such as Israeli politicians and pro-Israeli journalists) deliberately try to muddy the water by conflating anti-Israeli sentiment with anti-Semitism. I don’t care (and obviously generally don’t know) what community/religion/race/diaspora our customers come from – however in answer to the comment about taking fascist shekels, we would never knowingly serve a member of the BNP – and, in terms of individual Israelis, I don’t blame anyone for the misdeeds of their government, in the same way that I would hope that no one would hold me responsible for the misdeeds of British governments, past and present.

But we will continue to boycott Israel, and we certainly won’t hide the fact. All the time that we’ve been open, there have been stickers on the walls calling for a boycott. To me, it’s as legitimate as boycotting South Africa was in the 1980s [By the way, we don’t use Columbian coffee beans, we use Fairtrade Brazilian beans]. It doesn’t mean that I am a supporter of Hamas. It just means that I am more than a little frustrated with seeing absolutely no progress in favour of the Palestinian people, despite decades of handwringing by Western governments (and by progressive/leftwing Israelis). The walls, roadblocks, checkpoints and settlements continue to go up; the mass-killings, collective punishments, arbritrary arrests and incarcerations carry on, as the ineffectual UN resolutions continue to be passed.

I don’t see Hamas as being comparable to the WWII French Resistance, but I do see the Intifada in general as being so. It’s a popular uprising against a hated, and militarily far superior, occupying force. You cannot cite Palestinian suicide bombings and rocket attacks as being anywhere near the same league as what has been meted out by Israel; they don’t amount to 1 per cent of the total carnage and misery. Israel needs to think about why so much of the world is against it, in the same way that the USA has started to do in recent years (we boycotted them, too – and we had a notice up about it, but no complaints or counter-boycotts, as far as I’m aware – while Bush was in power; looks like it worked).

I am well aware of the Holocaust (my wife’s stepfather was in a concentration camp as a child) and the unjust treatment and displacement of Jews in general, in much of the world, for centuries. But these facts do not give Israel a licence to kill and oppress, or to steal land, anymore than the legacy of British colonialism gives Robert Mugabe excuses for his behaviour, despite what he might say.

And, Contentious Centrist, I’d like you to tell me exactly what my ‘ill-concealed wishes’ are, and why on earth I would feel ‘anguish …as a result of so many Jews feeling welcome in [my] cafe.’ The Jewish person who works at Café Crema certainly appears to feel welcome, and this doesn’t cause me much anguish. And this is not ‘gestural politics’. This is absolutely sincere.

Once again, to anyone I’ve offended, or made feel unwelcome, I apologise. However, the boycott remains. I’m genuinely sorry if this means we’ll lose certain customers; that’s obviously not our intention.

Chris, Café Crema, New Cross

John Strawson Answers:

The arrogance of Chris’s position is astounding. Britain has been a colonial power for 3 centuries during which time it played a major role in the slave trade, ethnically cleansed most of North America and Australia, created concentration camps in South Africa and fought vicious wars to keep its colonies – do not forget some 100,000 Kenyans died in the 1950’s. Incidentially it also prevented many cictims of the Nazis from reaching Palestine – and did nothing to stop the Holocaust during World War II. The same Britain has recently been helping occupy Iraq since 2003. Chris is not frustrated by his own state and its bloody colonial record – he is only frustrated by a Jewish State. I think he has a problem.

LA Times is carrying antizionist propaganda

Ben Cohen critiques Ben Ehrenreich’s Zionism as Hitlerian concept piece on Z Word.

Israel as the new Third Reich

From “It’s Almost Supernatural”:

The City Press is the Sunday newspaper with the third largest readership in South Africa. Last week’s edition contained an outstandingly repulsive article from Professor Ali Mazrui entitled “Is Israel bent on becoming the new Third Reich”.

Read the whole piece here, which concludes:

Unfortunately, articles such as this are becoming the staple diet for South African readers. It’s a tide that cannot be stemmed. And of course, it’s not just plaguing South Africa, as these articles can be found anywhere around the world. The difference with South Africa is that there is no pro-Israel/America alternative. It’s the same old drek wherever you look.

For more on what is happening in South Africa, read Alana Pugh-Jones on Engage.