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.

If I was Stephen Sizer, Christian Antizionist – James Mendelsohn

James Mendelsohn

If Melanie Phillips wrote an article which accused me of hoping that would Israel would disappear and of giving interviews to, endorsing or forwarding material from American white supremacists and Holocaust deniers, I guess there are a number of things I could do.

Firstly, I could try to deny its factual accuracy. I could say that I categorically reject any position that threatens Israeli sovereignty. That might be tricky, though, because when I was in Iran not so long ago, I reportedly said this:

“Asked to comment on the United Nations requirement to repatriate the Palestinian refugees to their homeland, he said that repatriation of Palestinians to their own territory will be effective in retaking their own country, because, when the Palestinian refugees come to their home, they will form majority of the population and would form a multi-ethnic state including Jews, Muslims and Christians.”

[UPDATE: Stephen Sizer now claims that this report misquotes what he said]

I could also insist that I “have never knowingly, to use [Melanie Phillips’] words, ‘given interviews to, endorsed or forwarded material from American white supremacists and Holocaust deniers’.” That would leave someone needing to explain the existence of various emails apparently sent out by me, including:

• this one which contains commentary by Holocaust Denier Michael Hoffmann II
• this one containing an article by conspiracy theorist Michael Collins Piper
• not forgetting this one containing an article by one Ted Pike (“an outspoken critic of ADL’s evil Jewish leadership“) taken from the website of conspiracy theorist Jeff Rense
• this one, seemingly sent out by me to the Holocaust Denier Israel Shamir, on first name terms, asking him to cooperate with me
• and also this email which seems to have come from me and which seemingly ended up in the inbox and on the blog of former National Front leader Martin Webster. (Of course, I can’t control who signs up for my mailings or where they end up… but why is Martin Webster so keen on what I have sent?)

As for the radio interview, that would leave me and my publisher with a bit of explaining to do as well.

Next, I could slip into one of my old favourites, “the Livingstone Formulation“. Not for the first nor even for the second time, I could suggest that someone is raising the spectre of antisemitism in an dishonest effort to stifle legitimate criticism of Israeli policies – specifically, I could write this:

“Is [Melanie Phillips' piece aiming] to deflect attention from Israel’s recent wanton killing spree in Gaza? Or was it written out of frustration at the decision of the Church of England Synod to divest its shares in Caterpillar? Or just part of the wider Zionist lobby targetting Barak Obama’s new Administration? Or is it perhaps a precursor to an imminent pre-emptive attack against Iran? Lets hope not otherwise it won’t be the libel or calumny we are debating but whether her friends who seem anxious for Armageddon are right after all.”

It would seemingly not concern me that repeatedly accusing Jewish people of raising the spectre of antisemitism as a dishonest ploy to stifle criticism of Israel’s policies might in itself be an antisemitic claim (because it implies that the [usually] Jewish people who do it are dishonest), nor that they might be doing so because, in light of those emails which seem to have left my outbox (not to mention my subtle insinuation of Israeli complicity in 9/11 or my repeated use of dubious sources), they might in fact have good reasons for doubting my philosemitic credentials.

Stephen Sizer

Thirdly, I could lapse into conspiracy theory, suggesting [as above] that Melanie Phillips’ piece is part of the wider plans of the wicked Zionist lobby working on both sides of the Atlantic to target Obama’s administration, to instigate a pre-emptive attack against Iran, and to discredit Chas Freeman (and me). Again, it would seemingly not overly concern me that the myth of an all-powerful Zionist lobby controlling American policy is just that – a myth. And, like the Independent, I might find it difficult to convince people that I really do emphasize the difference between the “Zionist lobby” and the older antisemitic trope of a “Jewish lobby”, because in the past I have specifically written that Dole & Clinton were cowed by the “Jewish Lobby”. It would of course help me to gush over the work of Mearsheimer and Walt (which I refer to as “dynamite”), even though numerous commentators have challenged its claims, notably Alan Dershowitz who pinpoints numerous factual errors and who summarises it as “the newest – and oldest – Jewish conspiracy”. Too bad that Dennis MacShane, someone who knows a bit more about government than me and whose work I have promoted on my own blog, (because I do really want people to believe that I condemn antisemitism) strongly criticises the work of Mearsheimer and Walt, summarising it as “smears against Jews”, concluding with the telling comment that “Jews, Israel and the fabled ‘lobby’ did not exist in any papers I saw or discussions I had as a government minister.” (MacShane, Globalising Hatred – The New Antisemitism, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008, pp. 137-138)

Fourthly, I could encourage my hearers to combat racism: I could urge them to “Support the United Nations Durban Review Conference to be held in Geneva in April. The Durban Review Conference, to be held in Geneva, Switzerland, 20-24 April 2009, will evaluate progress towards the goals set by the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa, in 2001. The Review Conference will serve as a catalyst to fulfilling the promises of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action agreed at the 2001 World Conference through reinvigorated actions, initiatives and practical solutions, illuminating the way toward equality for every individual and group in all regions and countries of the world.” It would seemingly not occur to me, and certainly not to my hearers, that the Durban 2001 conference turned into a cesspit of antisemitism (sorry! – “legitimate criticism of the policies of the Israeli government”), nor that numerous observers, including veteran anti-apartheid campaigner Benjamin Pogrund, consider that the 2009 conference will be little better, nor of course that one of the goals set in 2001 (point 65 of the Durban and Declaration and Programme of Action) was this: “We recognize the right of refugees to return voluntarily to their homes and properties in dignity and safety, and urge all States to facilitate such return”. Would that be a call for the Palestinian right of return, long recognized as a euphemism for Israel’s destruction?

Finally, I could quote from the Bible. In critiquing statements
allegedly made by Israeli military rabbis [which, if accurately reported, this writer would also condemn], I could ask this question:

“One has to ask which rabbinate? Perhaps the one the Apostle John refers to in the Book of Revelation [as a “synagogue of Satan”] 2:9-10, 3:9?”

This would be ironic, seeing as I devote a lot of my time to criticising those who see the Bible as predicting events in the modern-day Middle East. It would also be a bit silly, seeing as the people referred to in those passages were based in first-century Smyrna and Philadelphia respectively. It would also be tricky because both groups apparently “claim[ed] they were Jews but [were] not” – suggesting they may in fact have been Gentiles claiming to be Jews (something which has parallels in later history) – but who ever heard of a non-Jewish Israeli rabbi? It could also be a PR disaster for me, because a simple Google search shows how that phrase in Revelation has been and still is misused by antisemites today, whilst one of the leading works on left-wing anti-Semitism shows how the trope of Satanic or Satan-worshipping Jews has a long and inglorious history.

If I did all this, would you be convinced that I took antisemitism seriously? Or would you begin to wonder whether my particular brand of Christian anti-Zionism was in fact morphing into something else?

James Mendelsohn

Swansea’s Tesco 2 and the meaning of ‘racially aggravated’

From a few sources today I’ve heard that Dee Murphy and Greg Wilkinson, two activists from Swansea Action for Palestine, have been arrested for spray-painting (blood red) a boxes of Israeli peppers and stencilling ‘boycott Israel’ on the floor of a Sainsbury’s in Swansea. They weren’t arrested for racism, but for “racially aggravated criminal damage“.

The allegation was taken badly by the activists, who retorted, “We are beginning to feel harassed for speaking out”.  Activists who are charged with racially aggravated crime in relation to their anti-Israel campaigning tend to say this sort of thing – see for example the response of the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign when they were charged with racially aggravated harassment against an Israeli chamber orchestra. Jenny Bourne, a “Jewish veteran anti-racist campaigner”, commented “It is an irony that whoever made this ridiculous allegation is being racist by implying that “Israeli” constitutes a race”.

I’m not sure what happened at the supermarket or whether the raids on the homes of the protesters were or weren’t appropriate. They are not thought to be dangerous and have been bailed until June.  But Jenny Bourne is wrong, as far as I can see.  The law in question is the 1998 Crime and Disorder Act, Section II 28 (4) of which reads:

“In this section “racial group” means a group of persons defined by reference to race, colour, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins.”

The Home Office produced a guide to the act which includes:

“3.11 Section 28(1)(b) is the second string of the test of what amounts to “racially aggravated”. The racial hostility need not be the sole motivating factor nor does it need to be the primary one. Section 28(1)(b) makes it clear that the behaviour will be covered by the Act even if the racial hostility is only part of the motivation for the offence if the damaged property belonged, or was treated as belonging, to a Pakistani.”

So an offence can be legally defined as racially aggravated if it’s based in some way on nationality or citizenship, and when Greg Wilkinson told a friend, “the use of the words ‘Israel’ and ‘Israeli’ is no more racist than the use of, say, British, in relation to invasion of Iraq or Aghanistan”, he missed the point. The “racially aggravated” part is contingent on a crime having been committed in the first place – and it seems that the SAP activists are not denying the criminal damage.

The law exists to help the government identify racial, national, ethnic and religious elements in crimes. Basically, if the “Jewish veteran anti-racist campaigner” wants that law changed, she should look into how it is used in practice. She should search the web for, say, “racially aggravated” and the nationality of her choice (I tried Polish) to get a better impression of how it works.

It’s also worth considering that SAP don’t just “speak out”. They do inflammatory direct action with quantities of red paint. If I look at the blood-baths they create and try to work out what they want, my best guess is that they want me to hate and condemn Israel, the blood-letting state, as they do, and turn it into a pariah. In this video-recorded protest, shopping trolleys of  food were overturned in the entrance of Tesco, their contents strewn over the ground and fake blood flung about to the sound of a tom-tom. Even if we could rely on the protesters for a straight story (it is unclear, whether, for instance any West Bank products are from Palestinian businesses – it would be very ironic if the products they were slinging paint over were actually the genuine article) their message is not “stop buying settlement goods” – it’s a call for a “national boycott of Israel”. Dee Murphy blurted a reference to Israel’s “sin” revealing a religious slant to her protest. As is standard, a discussion of any Palestinian role in the conflict is completely absent from SAP’s reckoning.

But how are we supposed to protest Israel’s brutal occupation? Seems to me that if you’re an advocate for Palestinians then protesting products from the settlements which are labelled ‘West Bank’ or ‘Israel’ in a way which is misleading is very straightforward. You assert – publicly, to the supermarkets, and to your MP – your right to know whether the proceeds from the goods you are buying are helping the Palestinian economy or the settler economy. You explain why it is important to help one, and not to help the other. You need never (unless you already have a record as such, perhaps, or unless you encounter very prejudiced opponents) be misunderstood as anti-Israel or antisemitic.

So why are we still seeing so much fake blood?

Greg Wilkinson again, musing on the significance of the raid on his home:

“Still, question remains who authorised this disproportionate use of police power and numbers – thousands of pound worth of public money to get to the bottom of a box of Israeli peppers and some graffiti on a Bridgend floor?

This development shows two things:

1. the campaign to boycott is beginning to bite and the Zionists have been panicked into a hasty and counterproductive response.
2. Things are going to get much rougher from now on”

Those dangerous, all-controlling – but strangely ploddish – Zionists.

Jonathan Freedland on AIPAC and the myth of the “Israel Lobby”

Jonathan Freedland

This piece, by Jonathan Freedland, is from The Guardian.

Now they have their Joan of Arc. Those who have long claimed that the sinister, shadowy forces of “the Israel Lobby” pull the strings of US foreign policy at last have a martyr. Last week Charles Freeman, a former diplomat, said he would not take the job he had been offered, chairing the US National Intelligence Council: he had, he said, been the victim of a campaign of “character assassination” conducted by an “Israel Lobby [willing to] plumb the depths of dishonour and indecency”. In a furious statement, he declared that the “aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process”.

Those who in 2006 lapped up the thesis argued by the US academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, attributing to the mighty lobby the power to divert the US from its own interests, seized on Freeman’s fall as decisive proof. Walt himself declared: “For all of you out there who may have questioned whether there was a powerful ‘Israel lobby’,” he blogged, “think again.”

As the reception to the original Mearsheimer-Walt article showed, this is radioactive terrain. Those who wade in carelessly can find themselves burnt. The explanation is not complicated. The notion that Jews wield excessive power, and do so in mysterious ways; that they advance the interests of a foreign power; that they function as some kind of fifth column, and that as such they have often led their country into needless wars – all these are accusations that have been hurled at Jews going back many centuries. It should be no surprise that Jews’ ears prick up if they think they can hear these old tunes hammered out once more.

And yet, after several conversations with Israel supporters in both Washington and Tel Aviv, I have found no one who denies that Freeman was indeed the victim of advocates for Israel. It is quite true that many on Capitol Hill disliked Freeman’s devotion to Saudi Arabia, the country where he had once served as US ambassador: he recently suggested King Abdullah be renamed “Abdullah the Great”. True, too, that a critical blow came from Nancy Pelosi, the house speaker, reportedly outraged by Freeman’s overly indulgent attitude towards China’s rulers. But I’m reliably told that these lines of attack originated with the pro-Israel crowd. Nor have Freeman’s character assassins bothered to hide their fingerprints.

On the contrary, several have bragged about their role, among them Steve Rosen, a former official of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, who launched the attack on Freeman.

Surely, then, as Walt claimed, this settles not only the Freeman whodunit but the larger question of the mighty “Lobby”. Clearly it is every bit as vicious – and effective – as its detractors have claimed, able to derail even a new and popular administration such as Barack Obama’s simply because it had the temerity to pick a man who had, among other things, condemned the Israeli occupation as “brutal oppression” – right? Not quite.

The flaws in the Mearsheimer-Walt case remain as visible as when they were exposed by the Palestinian-American scholar Joseph Massad, Noam Chomsky and a clutch of other anti-Zionists. For one thing, if Israel and its backers really did control United States foreign policy, there would never be any divergence between them: Washington would simply do “the Lobby’s” bidding. But that is hardly the case. One can go back to the mid-1980s, when Israel and its friends begged the Reagan administration not to sell Awacs surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia – to no avail: the Saudis got their planes. Or spool forward to 1991 when George Bush pressured Israel to attend a peace conference against its will and withheld $10bn in much-needed loan guarantees unless Israel agreed to freeze settlements on occupied land. You might mention Israel’s proposed arms sales to China: Washington compelled Israel to back down, first in 2000 and again in 2005. More awkwardly, Israel has long sought the release of those who spied for it against the US. Washington has consistently refused.

Chomsky asks a useful question. If the US has been led to behave the way it does in the Middle East by the cunning “Israel Lobby”, how come it behaves the same way elsewhere? “What were ‘the Lobbies’ that led to pursuing very similar policies throughout the world?” As for the Middle East, Chomsky quotes the scholar Stephen Zunes: “There are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does Aipac [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby …”

The naive assumption at work here is that the American dog has no interests of its own, leaving it free to be wagged by the pro-Israel tail. It’s a convenient view, casting the great superpower as a hapless, and essentially innocent, victim. But guess what: the US emphatically does have its own strategic interests – oil chief among them – and it guards them fiercely. Support for Israel as a loyal, dependable ally – ready to take on Arab and other forces that might pose a threat to those interests – has served America’s purposes well. That’s why the US acts the way it does, not because Aipac tells it to.

Perhaps the most powerful example – if only because so many believe the reverse to be true – is the Iraq war. Plenty of Mearsheimer-Walt followers reckon it was the “Lobby” wot done it: it was Israel that pushed for war. But as Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, and others have explained, Israel’s leaders in fact repeatedly warned against an attack on Saddam, fearing it would distract from, and embolden, what it regarded as the real threat, namely Iran. As it happened, they were right.

So the myth of an all-powerful Israel lobby, pulling the strings, is a delusion. But it’s equally false to pretend that Aipac and its allies don’t exist or exert genuine influence. They do and they play hardball, as the Freeman affair has vividly demonstrated. (Indeed, the negative publicity that has resulted may make this victory a pyrrhic one.)

Viewed this way, clearly and through a lens unclouded by exaggeration and mythology, they are to be strenuously opposed. Their attempt to limit the voices heard in Washington is not just an offence against pluralism, it also hurts the very cause Aipac purports to serve: Israel.

Aipac’s approach – not so much pro Israel as pro the Israeli right wing – ends up pushing US politicians away from the policies Israel itself needs, specifically the dialogue with enemies and territorial concessions that are necessary if Israel’s long-term future is to be secured.

The good news is that alternatives are emerging. Founded last year, J Street styles itself as a “pro-Israel, pro-peace” advocacy organisation, thereby creating a space for those US politicians who support Israel but believe the policy of recent Israeli governments is hurting Palestinians and imperilling the future of the Jewish state. Aipac and its allies have had the monopoly on Israel advocacy for too long. Let’s hope the Freeman episode prompts America’s leaders to take a hard look at them, to see them as they really are: not all-powerful – and not always right either.

This piece, by Jonathan Freedland, is from The Guardian.

Radio 4 and Seven Jewish Children – David Hirsh

Howard Jacobson describes Seven Jewish Children as an antisemitic work:

“Caryl Churchill will argue that her play is about Israelis not Jews, but once you venture on to “chosen people” territory – feeding all the ancient prejudice against that miscomprehended phrase – once you repeat in another form the medieval blood-libel of Jews rejoicing in the murder of little children, you have crossed over. This is the old stuff. Jew-hating pure and simple – Jew-hating which the haters don’t even recognise in themselves, so acculturated is it – the Jew-hating which many of us have always suspected was the only explanation for the disgust that contorts and disfigures faces when the mere word Israel crops up in conversation. So for that we are grateful. At last that mystery is solved and that lie finally nailed. No, you don’t have to be an anti-Semite to criticise Israel. It just so happens that you are.”

He re-states this view when Jacqueline Rose and Churchill herself defend the play. If Jacobson is right then it follows that the play has no artistic or political value.

BBC Radio 4 has decided not to stage the play. Radio 4’s drama commissioning editor Jeremy Howe, rejected the play, writing in an email:

“It is a no, I am afraid. Both Mark [Damazer, Radio 4 controller] and I think it is a brilliant piece, but after discussing it with editorial policy we have decided we cannot run with it on the grounds of impartiality – I think it would be nearly impossible to run a drama that counters Caryl Churchill’s view. Having debated long and hard we have decided we can’t do Seven Jewish Children.”

They have made the wrong decision. If it is a “brilliant piece” of course it should be broadcast. If it is a “brilliant piece” how could it be “countered”? Brilliant theatre does not require something else to be broadcast another night in order to balance it.

Why would Radio 4 not broadcast a “brilliant piece”? The official BBC statement says that “we felt it would not work for our audience.” Why not?

The implication, of course, is that The Jews will not allow the BBC to broadcast this “brilliant piece”.

Tell them its antisemitic. Tell them its unbalanced. Tell them the BBC is biased.

If the piece is antisemitic then its crap. And it shouldn’t be broadcast.

If the piece is “brilliant” then it should be broadcast, and the BBC should stand up to the full wrath of “Israel Lobby” – or as the Independent would say, the “Jewish Lobby“.

David Hirsh

Elders of Zion to retire

The Forward has the scoop.

HT Edmund.