“Absolute Observer” goes cooking.

“Absolute Observer” has just sent us his Recipe For “the Lobby”.

The Ingredients

The Recipe

Ah, tis the season of goodwill, and many of us are looking forward to many a happy hour cooking up our familiar and traditional dishes. Today, however, I would like to do something different. Since Christmas is fastly becoming the new Easter, I thought I’d take an old Easter dish and rehash it so that, with luck, a new tradition will be born. I do hope you try this for yourselves.

This recipe has been popular for years. Originating in Russia (although, some still think it is from Prague), it has been a staple for about 100 years. It fell out of favour after about 1945 but, with a slight change here and there, re-appeared about five years ago. People who you would never think would eat it, are now queuing up to do so.

As with all recipes, make sure you use only the most unimpeachable ingredients.

I tend to look for mine in the respectable Jewish and Israeli press. The more liberal the better – the US Jewish magazine Foreward comes highly recommended. However, if one is thinking of a more Israeli theme, then, I suggest, Haaretz.

Cooking Method
1. Take a story that appears to be ground-breaking (the fact that it has been covered a million times and contains nothing new should not be treated as a problem. I find that the words “amazing story” normally does the trick; this flatters the guests by implying that it is a new and original meal, and not merely a rehash of something that has been doing the rounds for years.).

2. Force the ingredients into a mould. This part is somewhat tricky. Sometimes, the ingredients contain a bit of complexity and, without the forcing, could well ruin the dish.

3. If you notice, in the present recipe the cook has simply ignored the fact that the original Haaretz article speaks only of Republican and right-wing Jews and that, amongst these groups, there is a great deal of disagreement them(between, ZOA and ADL for example).

4.Having carefully filleted the story for anything that might stop the dish from rising, mix harshly, until what were diverse arguments, opinions and institutions are fully erased and now blended into a singular perspective. (If at this stage, any of the original ingredients are still recognisable, simply smear the singular perspective over them so that what separates one from the other disappears from view.)

Having erased all differences you should by now have the perfect monolithic “Lobby”.

5. Take the now doctored batter and mix thoroughly with popular public misconceptions. Half-bake for as long as you like.

6. By now, the dish should begin to settle.
Test with a knife.

7. If what was previously the raw ingredients of “campaign against” and “oppose”, ingredients common to the entire US political process, have now hardened into “determined”, it is almost ready. Note, this hardening into “determining” is vitally important. Without the idea of the “Lobby” “determining” government appointments, it would lose its distinctive and unique “Jewish” flavour – the very essence of the dish itself.

8 Half-bake some more.

9. It is now ready to put on the table.

Serving
Serve with stories about how you can’t even cook this recipe without being called antisemitic and how people who haven’t even tried it will do all they can to stop you from making it.

Garnish with the tale that you have made the dish for the good of the Jews and serve.

Be discerning to whom you serve this dish. Personally, I find the gullible lap it up without thinking. They always ask for more of the same.

Tips.
1.The distortion of the original ingredients is essential, since without it, the whole dish falls to pieces and you end up looking rather foolish.

2. Try to avoid using the word “Jewish”. Much better is “Israel” or “Zionist”. That way people think they are getting something new as opposed to the older, and now discredited, dish. At my own dinner parties, I used to call it the “Jewish Lobby” and found that many people found it hard to swallow. By calling it the “Zionist Lobby” or the “Israel Lobby”, my guests just couldn’t get enough of it.)

3. Should your guests complain of antisemitism, simply blame the dish (the Lobby) for not allowing them to eat in peace. Remember, if people complain, it is never, never the cook’s fault.)

4. If there is any left over, simply put to one-side. Since the dish is rancid from the moment it is made, it cannot go off and can be used indefinitely.

Happy holidays and peace to all (well, nearly all)

(Alternatively, choose the healthy, non-racist, option – simply read Haaretz.)

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!).

Channel 4 on Israel Lobby: Back the Palestinians, Reject ‘Jew Conspiracy’ Theories

AWL on “Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby”.

The plain facts will impart a strong bias against Israel in any simple, straightforwardly honest report of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Today it is a David and Goliath story, with the Palestinians in the David and Israel in the Goliath role. Whether measured by economic weight, by military strength, or by diplomatic clout the disproportion between the strengths of the David and the Goliath is simply enormous.
To translate the natural pro-Palestinian bias which the facts of the conflict suggest into ideas that there is a Jewish-Zionist conspiracy behind US, British and European Union failure to act to compel Israel to make peace by allowing the Palestinians to have their own state, you need something else again: you need to tap into History’s very large and very septic tank of Jewish and Zionist conspiracy theory.
The Channel Four TV programme, Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby (16 November), was a case in point.
There are many difficulties in the way of a settlement, and only a fool or someone mortally hostile to Israel would pretend otherwise.
The idea that these difficulties justify continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, the slow expansion of Israeli settlements, the gruesome winkling-out of Palestinians, and at the end the elimination of the Palestinians as a distinct people — that idea is compatible only with extreme Israeli chauvinism.
Justice demands that the Palestinians have their own state; so does any hope of general peace for generations to come. Two, three, four or more generations, most likely.
It is plainly in the interests of general peace in the Middle East that the Arab-Israeli antagonism be ended. The USA’s alliance with Israel does create difficulties for it with economically and strategically important Arab states in the region. It has been in the interests of the whole policy for the Middle East which the USA launched with the invasion of Iraq that there should be a settlement.
US President George W Bush went further, in words, than any of his predecessors, coming out explicitly for a two-states settlement and for the so-called “road map” of 2003.
But Bush did nothing to force Israel to agree. The fact that the USA’s invasion of Iraq was not the quick triumph Bush expected, and drew the USA into a long war there, was probably one factor in Bush’s inaction.
So why do the USA, Britain, and other powers not exert the severe pressure on Israel that is the only way to achieve even serious negotiations for a settlement? Why has President Obama retreated, in the face of Israeli opposition, even from the demand on Israel that it stop expanding its West Bank settlements?
Part of it is inertia. Israel is a solid and strong ally for the USA in the region. Some Arab states are US allies, but all have regimes which the USA distrusts. But is that sufficient explanation?
Thus the stage is set for an explanation of US and European policy by way of conspiracy theories — assertions that there is a vast and powerful Jewish-Zionist network that exercises something like controlling power in the USA, Britain, and other countries; and it is the behind-the-scenes working of the conspiracy that explain why Israel is not compelled by the USA and the European Union to reach a settlement.
Paranoid right-wingers in the USA even believe that the USA is ruled by a “Zionist Occupation Government”, “ZOG”.
Now, it is a matter of fact that there is a powerful pro-Israel lobby in the USA. In that pluto-democratic system, rich people and organised pressure groups buy elected representatives by providing money without which they can not effectively stand for election and win. Organised lobbies can thus put themselves in a commanding position vis-a-vis the legislature, and secure their own interests.
It is notorious that the tobacco industry, the oil industry, the arms industry, big media corporations, and many other “interests” have thus been able to avoid regulation that would serve the public better.
American politics is also in part structured in “national” blocs.
Second, third, fourth, etc. generation immigrants still call themselves “Greek”, “Italian”, “Irish”, etc. The Irish lobby was once immensely powerful. It got the US Congress to vote for Irish independence during Ireland’s war for independence from Britain.
There is an “Arab lobby” in the USA, mainly, it appears, of corporate bosses with economic ties to Arab countries. The Israeli lobby is part of the system, and a very powerful and intensely motivated part of it.
And it is not only a matter of a pro-Israel lobby sustained by Jews in the USA. One of the strangest things in modern America has been the conversion en masse of the old Christian anti-semitic “constituency” into fervent Zionists — of “the-Jews-killed-Christ” types who would in the past have blamed Jews for the operations of financial institutions, and once expressed their prejudices in such populist phrases as William Jennings Bryan’s refusal “to be crucified on a cross of gold”.
Today they argue that the Bible says that in the days before the end of the world, the Second Coming of Christ and the day of God’s final judgement on humankind, Israel will be reborn. Lo and behold, Israel is reborn, and all is right with the Bible prophecy.
Here the intellectual and spiritual barbarism in which so many Americans live is the basis of an unreasoning commitment to Israel by millions of Americans. In the USA, all candidates for high office, the presidency for example, have to publicly proclaim a strong religious faith if they are to have a chance of election. Intertwined with the USA’s wonders of technology are still the superstitions of the Dark Ages.
So the Israel lobby is strong. So are other lobbies. With the Israel lobby alone, we get in response a revival of old conspiracy theories.
The Israel lobby is translated from a problem of the normal workings of American plutocratic democracy, of the power in public life of any well-financed and highly-motivated lobby and of primitive Christian religion, into a problem of conspiracy. It is translated into a modern manifestation of the ages-old “Jewish conspiracy”, idioms and variations of which are threatened throughout Christian civilisation.
To make that translation you need to have a certain predilection towards it — or to find the idea, once formulated, powerful because, subconsciously or consciously, you tap into the vast septic reservoir of ideas about “the Jews” and “Jewish control” that is there for the tapping into.
Almost as strange as the conversion of the too-recently anti-semitic “Christian Zionists” of the USA has been the de facto conversion of much of the international left to a variant of Jewish conspiracy theory.
Channel Four’s Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby was part of that.
Though it insisted that its “exposé” of the lobby was not an allegation of a Jewish or Zionist conspiracy, in fact, the “exposé” character of the programme belied that insistence, and its upfront “demand” for “transparency” more or less proclaimed the behind-the-scenes existence of some sort of conspiracy now.
In the programme, a very great deal was made of not much. Things that are not secret and not sinister were made out to be both. Contributions to MPs by Zionist pressure groups, individuals, and political lobbyists were presented as if they are unique, or uniquely influential, and of course they are not.
Either the programme meant to say or imply that there is a sinister, hidden, Zionist-Jewish influence or controlling hand in British politics on policy towards Israel — though, if it exists, why would its influence and control stop at that? — or it said very little. It said little, but implied a great deal more.
The programme wobbled badly in its targets, for instance on what motivates the pro-Israel lobbyists at Westminster. Commitment to Israel, its interests, and its defence? Yes. But one of the lobbyists — “the 18th [sic] richest man in England”, so the programme told us — owns a shopping mall in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and thus, the programme said, has a personal interest. So behind the Zionist, pro-Israel ideologue they found and “exposed” the age-old image of the money-grubbing Jew.
The truth is that there are all sorts of organised lobbies at Westminster. The increasing Americanisation of British politics makes lobbying in Britain too a large “industry”. Britain, too, is now, and increasingly so, very much a pluto-democracy — the transformation of the old Labour Party into New Labour, has accelerated that greatly. Political campaigning by big companies and industries is now pretty much the norm.
And it is not all that new — the sugar industry waged a vigorous campaign during the 1945-51 Labour government against a proposal to nationalise it.
The pro-Israel lobby at Westminster is part of a whole system which is long-established and recently much inflated. To present is as something hidden and especially sinister is, whatever the programme-makers say, to foment belief in “Jewish conspiracy” — or to tap into a pool of anti-Jewish paranoia that exists in British political sub-culture too.
That is what the Channel Four programme did, without making any real “revelation” to justify its tabloid-journalism-style “exposé” format and self-promotion.
Alan Rusbridger, editor of the Guardian, spoke on camera of the exceptional number of protest letters which any criticism of Israel provokes. So — there is a sizeable and passionately active group of people who back Israel? A large number of Jews in Britain back the Israeli Right? That is news? It is surprising? There is something specially sinister about it? Only if you slot it into preconceptions about a Zionist or Jewish network or conspiracy. Given the history of the 20th century, there is nothing surprising or sinister in passionate diaspora-Jewish support for Israel.
The “rabbi emeritus” of the Reform Synagogue in London spoke on camera of Israel as like South African apartheid. How? There are two systems of law in operation, one for Israeli Jews and another one in the Occupied Territories. A serious point and one worth thinking about.
The widespread idea (especially on the left) that Israel is equivalent to South Africa usually implies that the Israeli Jews — a compact nation — should go the same way as the South African whites, a minority privileged caste. That idea was proclaimed openly from platforms of “anti war movement” protests against Israel’s Gaza war The rabbi emeritus agrees? Or he forgets the content in which his ruminations emerge?
And so on.
There really is a powerful and highly motivated pro-Israel lobby, in which many Jews are active. It exerts influence within the US and British pluto-democratic systems. That is fact. To go beyond that, to “exaggerate’; to postulate something more, a sinister Jewish conspiracy, is not harmless.
In recent times the financial segment of capitalism has justly come in for much criticism. Not enough, but good! But the whole of capitalism, not just the banks, is rotten.
And the traditional corollary of the viewpoint that financial capital is particularly bad is that the problem with capitalism is “Jewish capital”.
A powerful cultural reservoir of “Jewish conspiracy” ideas exists. The connection of the current criticism of financial capital with that reservoir is as easy as raging fire jumping across a small gap. Programmes like Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby blaze a trail for such connections. Right wingers and fascists “on the ground” draw out the implications.
Anti-Semitism in Britain has risen alarmingly in recent times. Jewish conspiracy nonsense, even timid and half-hearted stuff such as Inside Britain’s Israel Lobby cannot but feed it.
A Jew-hunt will not help the Palestinians.
Issues in the conflict
The Palestinians are a people under foreign — Israeli — occupation and control. They have been in that position for two generations, for more than two-thirds of the time that Israel has existed.
Yes, Israeli occupation is brutal, and it is predatory. Over decades Israeli settlers have inched slowly into colonisation of the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, relentlessly winkling out and displacing the original inhabitants. They are still advancing now.
Plainly it is the intention of the dominant forces in Israel to colonise and permanently annex as much as they can of Palestine.
Israel has strength, power, and overall control of relations with the Palestinians. It could now, probably, reach a modus vivendi with the surrounding Arab states and with the Palestinians on the basis of accepting a Palestinian state on the territory Israel occupied in 1967, or even that territory with some deductions. It wasn’t always so, but it is so now, and has been for a long time.
Israel chooses not to. It holds the Palestinian people as a spider holds a fly in its web, slowly devouring it. Any settlement that led to an independent Palestinian state would put a stop to that process. Israel does not want such a setttlement.
The consequence of long-continuing Israeli occupation may well be to make the emergence of an independent Palestinian state in contiguous territory impossible. The longer things go on without a political settlement, without the setting up of a Palestinian state, the more the very possibility of such a state, ever, recedes towards impossibility.
The placement of settlements and roads indicates that this is the Israeli aim.
We must back the Palestinians’ demand for a state of their own alongside Israel. There are difficulties on the road, and we must register them.
Israel had to fight for its very existence in 1948, against five invading Arab armies, one at least of which, the Egyptian, openly raised the slogan, “Drive the Jews into the sea”; and against a sudden Egyptian attack in 1973.
It is surrounded by fundamentally hostile states. To this day only two Arab states, Jordan and Egypt, recognise Israel.
The demands of both the Palestinians and the Arab states, on the basis of which the Arab League proposes to reach a settlement with Israel, include, as well as a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel, the “return” of the “refugees” — of over five million people, all but a fraction of whom are not refugees but the descendants of the 750,000 Arabs who fled or were driven out of Israeli territory during the 1948 Arab invasions.
The existence of so many people classified as “Palestinian refugees” is the result of the deliberate denial to Palestinians of the right to work and citizenship in most of the Arab states surrounding Israel. The Arab states are as much responsible as Israel is for the present “refugee problem”.
The demand for the “return” of the refugees is the cutting edge, still, of a drive to destroy Israel, and is in contradiction to the Arab League’s declared willingness to reach a settlement with Israel in return for a Palestinian state in the territories occupied in 1967.
It is the cutting edge, also, of the claim that all pre-1948 Palestine is “Islamic land” and must be reclaimed. It is another way of proposing the end of the Jewish state. No national state would peacefully accept such a proposition, or anything like it.
Without the abandonment of the “Right of Return” the Arab League offer of peace for land — a Palestinian state — is a sham. It indicates that they have no real intention of “normalising” relations with Israel.
The idea that the Arab League will be willing to transmute the demand for the “right of return” into reparations payments and maybe some token “returns” is untested.

JPR regains its senses.

Jonathan Boyd is acting director of JPR, the Institute for Jewish Policy Research in London.

Read Jonathan’s piece “Antisemitism and the reported world” on CIF.

No conspiracy, no surprise.

Right wing journalist Peter Oborne’s comment piece on his Dispatches programme on the pro-Israeli lobby said :

“It is important to say what we did not find. There is no conspiracy, and nothing resembling a conspiracy.”

Why say this unless he had pre-conceived ideas ? Did he expect to find a conspiracy , did he look in vain for one ? Or maybe Oborne is a conspiracy theorist.

Toxic To Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, & Scapegoating – Chip Berlet

Charged with the fatal shooting of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller in a church in Wichita, Kansas, last Sunday morning, Scott Philip Roeder is a regular consumer of conservative talk radio, television, and websites. But did Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck—or any other commentator whipping up an audience with overheated demonizing rhetoric—actually help pull the trigger?

It’s not that simple, explains Chip Berlet, senior analyst for the independent think tank Political Research Associates (PRA), in a new study entitled Toxic to Democracy: Conspiracy Theories, Demonization, and Scapegoating.

“They are not legally culpable for the assassination of Dr. Tiller, says Berlet, “but they must share some portion of moral responsibility for creating   a dangerous environment.”

According to Berlet:

“Right-wing pundits demonize scapegoated groups and individuals in our society, implying that it is urgent to stop them from wrecking the nation. Some angry people in the audience already believe conspiracy theories in which the same scapegoats are portrayed as subversive, destructive, or evil. Add in aggressive apocalyptic ideas that suggest time is running out and quick action mandatory and you have a perfect storm of mobilized resentment threatening to rain bigotry and violence across the United States.”

Read the entire Media Release Here

Read the Executive Summary

Read the full text of the body of the report

Read the full text of the back of the report Notes, Bibliography, Index, etc.

Executive Summary:

Even before Barack Obama was sworn in as the
44th President of the United States the Internet
was seething with lurid conspiracy theories exposing
his alleged subversion and treachery. Among the
many false claims: Obama was not a proper citizen of
the United States (and his election as President
should thus be overturned); he was a secret, fundamentalist
Muslim; he was a tool of the New World
Order in a plot to merge the government of the
United States into a North American Union with
Mexico and Canada.

Hours following a flubbed inaugural oath of
office, the Internet circulated claims that Obama was
not really President of the United States because the
wording of the oath of office had been scrambled by
U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. A few
days after the inauguration came a warning that
Obama planned to impose martial law and collect all
guns.

Many of these false claims recall those floated by
right-wing conspiracy theorists in the armed citizens
Militia Movement during the Clinton administration
—allegations that percolated up through the media
and were utilized by Republican political operatives
to hobble the legislative agenda of the Democratic
Party. Assertions that President Clinton assisted drug
smugglers, ran a hit squad that killed his political
enemies, and covered up the assassination of his aide
Vincent Foster first circulated on right-wing alternative
media, spread to right-wing information networks,
and eventually appeared in mainstream
media outlets.

A similar scenario could add to the already
daunting challenges of the Obama administration.
When Obama’s “web-savvy” aides saw “conspiracy
theories building up on the internet,” they staged a
repeat swearing in as “the fastest way to stop the
speculation getting out of control.” Such events illustrate
the power and pervasiveness of conspiracism.

What Richard Hofstadter described as the “paranoid
style” in U.S. right-wing movements derives
from belief in an apocalyptic struggle between “good”
and “evil,” in which demonized enemies are complicit
in a vast insidious plot against the common
good, and against which the conspiracist must heroically

Book Review: Perry and Schweitzer, ‘Antisemitic myths: a historical and contemporary anthology’ – David Hirsh

This Review is from Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 32 No. 4 May 2009 pp. 749-750

Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, ANTISEMITIC MYTHS: A HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY ANTHOLOGY, 2008, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 384 pp., $24.95 (pb).

To subvert the Queen’s Christmas Message to her subjects this year, Channel 4 Television hosts, unchallenged, Holocaust denier and antisemite Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, so its viewers can benefit from hearing his ‘alternative world view’. A friend in South America emails this New Year: ‘Today there’s a big banner just outside my place (very central location, as you remember) by the Communist Party saying ‘‘Israel the Nazis of the Middle East’’ and showing the Israeli flag with a swastika inside the Magen David . . . made me tremble, to be honest.’

The children and grandchildren of the Jews who fled to Israel from anti-Jewish racism in Europe, in the Middle East and in Russia have not yet found peace and neither has the antisemitism from which they fled been defeated. Israelis act and they interact with their neighbours; wisely and stupidly, aggressively and defensively, employing racist ways of thinking and antiracist ways of thinking.

When Jews act in the world their actions are often understood within antisemitic discourse and are often narrated using antisemitic language, but these processes are not usually conscious and are not usually clearly understood. Even many antiracists are only dimly aware of the nature of the rich resources of antisemitic assumption, trope and image which lie deep in the cultural unconscious and which sometimes shape the way that they themselves think about actually existing Jews who act in the world.

It is for this reason particularly that the material presented by editors Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer in Antisemitic Myths: A Historical and Contemporary Anthology is important. ‘The Jewish Question’ is again high on the agenda, is a live issue, for much respectable, intellectual and anti-bourgeois thought, although it is not at the moment so important in mass culture. ‘The Jews’ are thought to have thrown their lot in with imperialism in the Middle East, to have succeeded in joining a white ‘Judeo-Christian’ elite in America and to have dodged the line of racist fire in Europe by constructing Muslims as the ‘new Jews’. The Holocaust piety of the 1990s is being smashed up by the taboo-breaking excitement of Holocaust blasphemy. Constructions of ‘the Jews’ in terms of ultimate morality or absolute victimhood are being replaced by more apparently radical ones. It again appears to be respectable to think of ‘the Jews’ as powerful, secretly cohesive, disproportionately influential and susceptible to the temptation of committing cold-blooded acts of childkilling.

Perry and Schweitzer offer us a compilation of Jew-hatred’s greatest hits across the centuries. They give us extracts from texts demonstrating Christian demonization of Jews and blood libel; Jewish responsibility for Plague and how the Jews were expelled from Spain; from Martin Luther to Voltaire, the Catholic Church to Marx, the Dreyfuss affair to the pogroms, conspiracy theory to the Holocaust, Soviet antisemitism to Islamist and African American antisemitism.

This is material that every antiracist should know. This is material that everybody who wants to talk about Israel and Palestine should understand. This is material with which anybody who wants to be able to judge whether or not a contemporary text is antisemitic needs to be familiar.

Yet I fear that the material is presented in this ‘anthology’ in a form which is as likely to repel as to absorb contemporary antiracists. This is not only because today’s anti-Zionist Zeitgeist contains within itself a significant degree of auto-immunity against a serious consideration of antisemitism. It is also because the book is constructed within a political and sociological framework which is not going to be able to educate a new generation of antiracist activists and scholars on the nature and history of antisemitic mystification.

The book presents antisemitism less as a racism alongside other racisms and more as an ahistorical and unchanging fact of human history. While the aim of the work is not to offer a sociological or historical account of the causes and natures of distinct manifestations of Jewhatred in different times and different places, it is not as concerned as it might be to problematize similarities and differences or to grapple with the complexity of geographical and historical contingencies. The material seems to respond to the characteristically antisemitic view which positions ‘the Jews’ at the centre of world history by attempting to thrust instead the antisemite into that pre-eminent position. It offers little explanation as to why and how the central themes of Jew-hatred reappear and reinvent themselves in radically different times, contexts and places.

Perry and Schweitzer repeat a standard misreading of Marx’s On the Jewish Question, arguing that Marx was an antisemite, and in doing so they miss a key wider point of which Marx himself was acutely aware. Antisemitism is not only bad for Jews but when it is found within radical thought it is also an indicator of a wider sickness. In my view antisemitism is to be found, now hidden, now less so, as a potentiality within much contemporary antihegemonic, radical, liberal and socialist commonsense, and its presence there should be taken seriously by those of us for whom such political movements are important.

It is because antisemitism is a live and virulent threat that sociologically and politically sophisticated engagement with it is required. This book offers much necessary material but it does so within a framework which will not help to regenerate radical thought as much as it could do.

©  2009 David Hirsh Lecturer in Sociology Goldsmiths, University of London

This Review is from Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 32 No. 4 May 2009 pp. 749-750

The Livingstone Formulation

I’m doing some work on the use of the Livingstone Formulation.  I’m collecting examples.  If anyone knows of examples that I’ve missed, please quote in the comments box with links or references.  I’m particularly interested in its use in academic and high profile public discourse.  I’ve got instances from, in no particular order:

Judith Butler, Ken Livingstone, Stephen Sizer, Jenny Tonge, Tam Dalyell, UCU, UCU mark II, Jacqueline Rose, Richard Ingrams, BBC website (on David Miliband), Anatol Lieven, Tony Judt, Antony Lerman, Mearsheimer and Walt, Charles Linbergh, Norman Finkelstein, David Duke, Nick Griffin, Caroline Lucas, Johan Hari, Bruce Kent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, BBC website (US withdrawal from Durban Review), Martin Shaw twice,  Caryl Churchill, Paul Oestreicher, Tariq Ali, Kare Willoch, Ken Loach, Fintan O’Toole, Michael Neumann.

There are two elements to the Livingstone Formulation.  Firstly a conflation of something which is arguably, at least, connected to antisemitism into “criticism” and secondly an accusation (usually implied) that the “critic” is being characterized as antisemitic knowingly and in bad faith by the Jews or by the ‘Israel lobby’ (usually implied)  in order to try to de-legitimize criticism of Israel.

All help gratefully received.

Eve Garrard on contemporary antisemitism in Britain

Eve Garrard

Here is Eve’s concluding paragraph.  How she comes that conclusion is a must-read, on normblog – offering a goldmine of links and an outline of what is going on in Britain.

There is not at the moment, so far as I know, a deliberate and conscious anti-Semitic project on the left to undermine the standing of Jews in Britain and elsewhere, and to deny them the rights of self-determination and self-defence which are accorded to others. But there is a significant number of people on the liberal-left behaving as if they were in fact complicit in such a project; who are impervious to the chilling anti-Semitic effects of their behaviour; who are in practice acting as enablers and facilitators for those full-blooded anti-Semites who want to exploit the rich possibilities of this situation. This willingness to prepare the ground for Jew-hatred is in itself a disgusting development on the left, and a betrayal of some of its most basic principles. It is also a proper source of alarm for Jews who are beginning to feel that the brief decades in which being a Jew in Britain was unproblematic may be coming to an end.

Do read the whole piece.

French “antizionist” Dieudonné to stand for European Parliament

Report in Le Monde.