Anti-Semitism, Leslie Campbell’s student; “dedicate to albert shanker” (1969)
NEW VS OLD ANTI-SEMITISM
Walter Zeev Laqueur (born 26 May 1921) is an American historian and political commentator. He was born in Breslau, Germany (modern Wrocław, Poland), to a Jewish family. In 1938, Laqueur left Germany for the British Mandate of Palestine. His parents, who were unable to leave, became victims of the Holocaust. He lived in Israel 1938-53 and since then in the UK and US.
He was Director of the Institute of Contemporary History and the Wiener Library in London in 1965-1994. He was founder and editor, with George Mosse, of the Journal of Contemporary History and of Survey 1956-1964. He was founding editor of the The Washington Papers. From 1969 he was member, later Chairman (until 2000) International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington. He was Professor of History of Ideas at Brandeis University 1968-1972, University Professor at Georgetown University 1976-1988. He has been visiting professor of history and government at Harvard, University of Chicago, Tel Aviv and Johns Hopkins University.
His main works deal with European history in the 19th and 20th century, especially Russian history, German history and Middle East history. He has written on many topics from the German Youth Movement, Zionism, Israeli history, the cultural history of the Weimar Republic and Russia, Communism, the Holocaust, fascism and diplomatic history of the Cold War. His books have been translated into many languages and he was one of the founders of the study of political violence, guerrilla warfare and terrorism. His comments on international affairs have appeared in many American and European newspapers and periodicals.
Old Anti-Semitism
Walter Laqueur in The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism (2006) is convinced that anti-Semitism has a new and covert form. He believes that if there has been controversy about the continuity between the old mainly religion-inspired anti-Semitism and the new racialist theories, there has been a similar debate about the continuity between racialist anti-Semitism (of roughly speaking the period between 1880 and 1945) and the new anti-Semitism (or Judeophobia) of the period after World War Two.
There certainly is an obvious if superficial difference: prior to 1945 few anti-Semites hesitated to call themselves anti-Semites, whereas more recently coyness has widely prevailed and open, outspoken anti-Semitism is restricted to sectarians of the extreme right. Post-1945 anti-Semites have been careful to stress that their hostility is limited to colonialist, capitalist, imperialist individuals and groups advocating racialist, aggressively militarist, and reactionary politics.
New Anti-Semitism
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/docarchive
Defining Hezbollah
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Last broadcast yesterday, 20:05 on BBC World Service (see all broadcasts).
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Synopsis
But what exactly is Hezbollah and why do people support it?
For Assignment Owen Bennett Jones reports from southern Lebanon on the nature and structure of the Shia movement that is so difficult to define.
Hezbollah: Terrorist organisation or liberation movement?
Five years after the 34-day war of 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah, many Lebanese fear that there could be another, bigger conflict to come
Read more on the BBC News website
Defining Hezbollah
Thu, 13 Oct 11
Duration:
27 mins
In Lebanon many people fear that another war between Hezbollah and Israel is just over the horizon. But what exactly is Hezbollah and why do people support it? For Assignment Owen Bennett Jones reports from southern Lebanon on the nature and structure of the Shia movement that is so difficult to define.
BBC NEWS
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UK / 22 February 2010… groups such as the United Nations which should know better. of utter automatic condemnation. We don't have to put up with that." 'New' anti-semitism…
Milton Viorst
Milton Viorst can be labeled as being a “self-hating Jew,” because he takes a balanced view of Isreal. In his book What Shall I Do With This People? Jews and the Fractious Politcs of Judaism (2002) Viorst writes that shortly after the 1967 War, seventy-two noted intellectuals many of them mainstream Zionists, founded the land of Israel Movement. In a highly publicized manifesto, they put aside historical differences to proclaim a nationalism based on devine imperative.
“In the land of the Bible,” and Israeli scholar wrote, summing up the war’s transcendental nature, “the Israelis met the Israelites.”
Jews spoke exultantly of the victory as a “miracle.” They had long used the term to describe the recapture and purification of the Temple after the Maccabee triumph over the Selucids in biblical times It was also the term Jews used to represent their messianic expectations. Religious Zionism’s rabbis, historically modest in their messianic expectations, were the lustiest in proclaiming sacred meaning. The victory, they say, mean the mesianic process was reaching frition, even if the Messiah hemself was absent. National borders that went beyond those of ancient Israel were, to them, proof of the Messiah’s hand.
Mainstream Zionism, meanwhile, having long tried to curb the Jewish appetite for territory, saw itself losing control. In 1948, David Ben-Gurion, its leader, had agreed to the partition, reasing that sharing the land was more likely than conquest to win the international communty’s endorsement, which was essential to the state’s survival. He also hoped to avoid protracted warfare with the Arab world. Most Jews agreed then that a state with modest borders was better than no state at all. Suddenly, this view looked timid.
Viorst writes that the chief dessenters from Ben-Gurion’s logic belonged to a fraction within Zionism known as Revisionism, modeled in the 1920s by its founder, Vladimir Jabotinsky, on the authoritarian nationalism then thriving in Europe. Jabotinsky dismissed Gentile opinion, wheather Arab or Western, as irrevevant to Jews. He urged them not to shrink from using force to achieve statehood, and to agree to nothing less than Israel’s historic frontiers.
So rancourous weer the differences with mainstream that Revisionism, in 1935, seceded from the Zionist movement altogether. During the War of Independence, the two rival factions fought a small but vicious civil war, the Altalena affair. Isreal’s victory over the Arabs, and mainstream Zionism’s defeat of Revisionism, appered in 1948 to scub the natinal agenda clean of expanisionist dreams. The Likud Party, Revisionism’s political arm advanced its view after 1967, which picked us an unexpected ally.
The ally was was religious Zionism. Since Herzl’s time, religious Zionism’s raison d’etre had been to direct the Jewish state toward greater piety. Then, overnight, it emerged as the engine of Israeli territorialism. It became the spearhead of territorial messianism. Religious Zionists were precedented among Zionists in their zealotry. Unlike Revisionsims’s secular vision, their inspiration was built purely on devotion to God.
The course chosen by religious Zionism was an eerie reminder of the Holy Land in the last days of the Second Temple. Its militants evoked the Zealots, who lead the Jews into the catastrophic war against Rome. Its leader recalled Rabbi Akiva, who served as mentor of the ill-starred Bar-Kokhba. The lessons that religious Zionism drew divided the Jews, provoked the Arabs and alienated much of the rest of the world.
Though one wing of traditional Zionsim favored exchaing territory for peace, another argued that national security forbade any but the most mosest withdrawal. Mainstream Zionsim’s abivalence made clear that even seculars had difficulty, once the land was in Israel’s hands, giving it up. As time has passed, giving it up has become harder still.
Many later abandoned this intransigence, and peace agreements were reached with Egypt and Jordan. But the fluidity that seemed present in Israel right after the war soon hardened, particularly toward Palestinians, whose homeland covered biblical terrain. One can debate wheteher the opportunity for agreement ever existed at all, but the alliance of religius Zionism and Revisionsm prevailed. Since 1967, overall peace between Jews and Arabs has failed to surmount the obstacles that both sides have place in its way.
Most Israelis agree that, in the years since the war, mainstream Zionism has lost the dynamism of its youthful days and, divided over the territories, grown unsure of itself. Revisionism, meanwhile, has probaly become a shde more pragmatic. But religuous Zionism, still conviced of its divine mission, is no less fierce many decades later than it was in the wake of the great victory of 1967. (188-191)
SECTION 2
Laqueur posits that according to research in Western Europe in 2002, 63 percent of those surveyed in Spain believed Jews had too much power in the business world (44 percent in Belgium, 42 percent in France, 40 percent in Austria, 37 percent in Switzerland, 32 percent in Germany, and 21 percent in the United Kingdom). Perhaps more significantly, 58 percent in Germany thought that Jews were talking too much about the Holocaust (57 percent in Spain, 56 percent in Austria, 52 percent in Switzerland, 46 percent in France, 43 percent in Italy).
Laqueur argues that it can be argued that such figures may be meaningless since the figures for those who had never even heard of the Holocaust were almost as high (and even higher among the younger generation). But as so often happens, it was the perception that mattered, not the facts. In brief, while the conflict between Israel and the Arabs has provided much fuel for the spread of anti-Jewish feeling in the Muslim world, it cannot explain anti-Semitism among blacks in the United States any more than it can among groups in Russia, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere. (150)
Timothy J. Meagher in Chapter 8 of The Columbia Documentary History of Race and Ethnicity in America (2004), “Racial and Ethnic Relations in America 1965-2000,” writes that the apparent demise of alliances between blacks and Jews has seemed a particularly telling example of the new hardening of racial boundaries that really began in the 1950s.
Jews had played a prominent role in supporting black civil rights back into the early twentieth century. Jews had helped found the NAACP and the Urban League and over time had played an increasingly important role in sustain both organizations. From that time through the great civil rights struggles of the 1960s, Jews played an unusually significant role in black struggles. Such efforts reflected an historic Jewish commitment to protecting minority rights [while helping to further their own], a commitment rising both out of the values of Jewish culture and practical consideration of Jewish vulnerability as a small non-Christian minority in a largely Christian and sometimes anti-Semitic American society.
Yet even as Jews and black fought together in the civil rights struggles, strains appeared in their relationship. The turning point in black-Jewish relations, however, came in 1968 [with the neocons riding on the exuberance of the 1967 War], in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill-Brownsville. In an experiment aimed at improving the education of poor African American children, the city, drawing on Ford Foundation funding, sought to increase local input and control of the schools in the black neighborhood.
The experiment turned into a two-year war pitting black activists against the schoolteachers and their union, the United Federation of Teachers. Many of the teachers and the union’s leadership were Jewish, and the battle dissolved into a bitter wrangle of charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism.
Ocean Hill-Brownsville was the first broadly visible revelation of the new strains in black-Jewish relations, but in succeeding years there would be many more. Some Jewish organizations would line up against black ones over legal challenges to racial affirmative action plans such as the DeFunis case in 1974 and the Bakke case in 1978. These cases as Cheryle Greenberg notes, “the first time black and Jewish organizations had publicly and formally positioned themselves on opposite sides of a civil rights question.”
Meanwhile, some popular black leaders, most notably the Nation of Islam minister, Lewis Farrakhan, spoke openly and heatedly of alleged longtime Jewish exploitation of blacks extending as far back as the slave trade. Black and Jewish leaders also clashed over foreign policy, most notably over Israel and it treatment of Palestinians Arabs.
The growing diversions between blacks and Jews appeared to grow out of increasing divergences of perceived interests. Jews had, by and large, been successful in American life and became even more so after the 1960s as the old Protestant elite collapsed and new industries emerged. Blacks and Jews clashed not just because of conflicting interests, but also because of changing understandings of what constituted a minority in American life, [Jews became White, while African Americans remained without White Privilege]. (695-6)
SECTION 3
Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, and Nicolas Berg, another American civilian, were murdered (and their murders were televised) in a particularly gruesome way because they were Jews, not Zionist. There have been many such cases, and though contemporary Islamists have also killed many non-Jews in Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere, the question arises: why were Jews singled out? Why did anti-Semitism become perhaps the most important single factor in the new Muslim ideology, not only in North Africa, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, but perhaps even more prominently among the strong and growing Muslim Diaspora in Europe? Why the prevalence of “kill the Jews” slogans that had not been heard in the streets of Europe since the days of Adolf Hitler? (201)
Laqueur mentions the murders of two Jewish men: Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, and Nicolas Berg, another American civilian, were murdered (and their murders were televised) in a particularly gruesome way because they were Jews, not Zionist. However, I say these men lost their lives do to what historian George Frederickson called, “the arrogance of race,” in a book by that name. In their hubris, they thought they could use whiteness as blindness to the fact that they were Jews contacting Muslim fundamentalists who define all Jews as the enemy. Their Jewishness could be hidden behind whiteness in the American context, but not in the Islamists prospective because they see Israel as a European state, an intruder, in the Middle East. The arrogance of race/racialization has been dealt with in sociology by Jewish writers such as Sander Gilman and Matthew F. Jacobson, where Jews metaphorically convert themselves into Anglo-Saxons.
SECTION 4
Laqueur refers to the incitement of the preachers in the mosques playing an important role in the litany of Arab complaints against Jews, but the anti-Jewish attacks might have happened even without the Islamic religious component, as other examples show. In the United States, for instance, the black-Jewish alliance of past decades had broken down and anti-Semitism in segments of the black population had became prevalent, but this had little to do with what the Koran and its interpreters were saying about the Jews. Furthermore, the Palestinian cause was not that close to the heart of the American blacks. (202)
The best person to answer Liqueur’s inquiry as to “anti-Semitism in segments of the black population that had became prevalent because this had little to do with what the Koran and its interpreters were saying about the Jews,” is the late James Baldwin in his essay, Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White, which appeared in The New York Times Magazine, April 9, 1967. Baldwin was brought up by his father to be a Pentecostal preacher and therefore has all the religious pseudo-qualifications to answer pulpit questions.
Baldwin writes that when we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them. We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building. A coat of paint, a broken window, a stopped sink, a stopped toilet, a sagging floor, a broken ceiling, a dangerous stairwell, the question of garbage disposal, the question of heat and cold, of roaches and rats—all questions of life and death for the poor, and especially for those with children—we had to cope with all of these as best we could. Our parents were lashed down to futureless jobs in order to pay the outrageous rent. We knew that the landlord treated us this way only because we were colored, and he knew that we could not move out.
The grocer was a Jew, and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store. The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat. We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes, and the pawnbroker was a Jew—perhaps we hated him most of all. The merchants along 125th Street were Jewish—at least many of them were; I don’t know if Grant’s or Woolworth’s are Jewish names—and I well remember that it was only after the Harlem riot of 1935 that Negroes were allowed to earn a little money in some of the stores where they spent so much.
Not all of these white people were cruel—on the contrary, I remember some who were certainly as thoughtful as the bleak circumstances allowed—but all of them were exploiting us, and that was why we hated them.
Later in the essay Baldwin states that the ultimate hope for a genuine black-white dialogue in this country lies in the recognition that the driven European serfs merely created another serf here, and created him on the basis of color. No one can deny that the Jew was a party to this, but it is senseless to assert that this was because of his Jewishness. One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough—for not having learned from his history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different.
“All racist positions baffle and appall me,” Baldwin states. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorable leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.
If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.
The crisis taking place in the world, and the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the Star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom’s most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews.
Neocons/American Zionists ~ Enemy of the Colored Peoples
Houston A. Baker takes a secular argument in Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (2008) where Baldwin leaves off by charging the American Zionist, nee Neocons of committing the Nazism their ancestors had escaped via the Allies (black and white and peoples of color), upon African Americans and other peoples of color in the inner-cities. Baker charges that neocons have tacitly supported construction of the gulag of privately financed prisons and internment camps for illegal immigrant that now bears the stamp and issues the stock of Wackenhut and Corrections Corporation of America. There are more black men in prison or under surveillance of the criminal justice system in the United States than are enrolled in the nation’s colleges and universities. Neocons think of this disgrace to national ideals [see Irving Kristol’s 40 Good Years] as the appropriate outcome of the rule of law and order. Their influence captured the Republican Party during Ronald Reagan’s presidency where they campaigned and assaulted the New Left and the counterculture. (58-9)
The Neocons were so successful at their tasks until when PNAC designed the so-called War on Terror, they were unable to recruit sufficient young men and women from the inner city to fill the 25 percent of military they usually filled because so many were in prison on flimsy law and or charges or were now felons.
Hitler’s children always incorporate the philosophy of their father as can be seen in Irving Kristol essay Forty Good Years, where Kristol brags about his and his fellow Neocons successfully kept the Negro in his place by maintain their collective social science foot on his neck.
Abstract:
Presents the editor's, Irving Kristol, view on the historical background of "The Public Interest" journal. Mode of thought that was beginning to dominate the political and social discourse in and out of academia in 1965; Kinds of issues that provoked the founding of the journal; List of issues associated with economics and social science.
Excerpt of Text
But we were never single-minded economists or social scientists. On the contrary, we soon discovered that behind, the hard realities of economics and social science were the equally hard realities of morality, family, culture, and religion--the "habits of the mind" and "habits of the heart," as Tocqueville said, that determine the quality and character of a people. To the extent to which these factors, too, could be subject to social research and thoughtful social analysis, they gave our articles their distinctive character. In its last decade, the magazine had the good fortune to acquire, first as executive editor and then as the editor, Adam Wolfson, who brought with him a lively interest in and keen appreciation of just such subjects.
In my case, this mode of thought took the form of what came to be known as neo-conservatism.
Baker writes that the only material items explicitly missing from neo-conservatism’s monuments to insider, ethnically cleansed egos were signs on their think-tank office doors reading: “No unassimilated Negroes welcome here!” In a general assessment of neoconservatives’ effect upon the national polity he quotes Gary Dorrien [which is dawning slowly in the Occupy Wall Street movement worldwide]:
Neo-conservatism cut the heart out of populism. Neoconservatives gave a free ride to the business and financial elites who controlled American’s investment process. They justified the corporate class’s leverage buy-outs and greenmail, and defended the managerial prerogatives of technocratic elites no longer bound to community, cultural, or even national loyalties. They rationalized America’s regressive tax code and its worsening mal-distribution of wealth. They deflected responsibility for America’s social and economic decay onto America’s cultural elites. (68-9)
BBC WORLD NEWS
http://www.bbc.co.uk/search/news/?q=occupy%20wall%20street%20world%20wide
17 October 2011
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NEW 4 hours ago… s financial district for a third day, following the long-running 'Occupy Wall Street' protest in New York.
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UK / NEW 6 hours ago… part in the Occupy London protest outside St Paul's Cathedral. The demonstration is part of a global campaign inspired by the Occupy Wall Street…
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Business / NEW 8 hours ago… turning against banks, with evidence of anger on the streets (from Occupy Wall Street to Occupy Frankfurt) and sympathy from some leaders (according…
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UK / NEW 16 hours ago000 people on Saturday. The demonstration is part of a global campaign inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York. The US protest…
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Comments
I am sorry that I have not answered some of my comments. The reason is that I do not internet at home and it takes me so long to compose at the public centers.
Please pardon the misspellings and grammar mistakes.
Just take you time and things won't drag by too hard.
Thanks