Anti-Semitism myths
LOOK, judge Neil Gorsuch seems like a lovely person. I would gladly let him be the spokesman for my travel website. He possesses a sharp jurist’s mind, and those who know him seem to like him. He has a groovy last name that I am stunned does not appear anywhere in the Harry Potter series. He says that a judge who likes every outcome he reaches is not a good judge, and if he is willing to subject himself to the constant misery of making decisions he does not like, I will not stand in his way.
But how can we in good conscience allow the appointment of a new justice to the nation’s highest court when we have not yet had the results of a democratic election?
“I believe that awaiting the result of a democratic election, rather than having a nomination fight in this partisan election-year environment, will give the nominee more legitimacy and better preserve the Court’s credibility as an institution,” said Senator Rob Portman, and I agree with him.
We should nominate someone once we have the results of a democratic election, and not a second before. President Donald Trump of all people should be fighting to stop this immoral process. As he keeps reminding us with his accounts of “millions upon millions” of fraudulent votes cast, this was apparently no democratic election. How can one possibly proceed?
It is important to stand on principle regardless of the merits of the nominee, which may well be substantial.
Besides, we are still in the throes of a campaign. In fact, Trump has already gathered enough funds to begin his 2020 reelection bid – over $7 million. The fundraising has begun. The sloganing has begun. He has sent a letter to the Federal Election Commission and everything.
In such a partisan election environment, we cannot proceed.
FOR a phenomenon often dubbed “the world’s oldest hatred”, anti-Semitism is not well understood. From top Iranian officials who blame the Talmud for the international drug trade to British political activists who claim that the Mossad is stealing their shoes, anti-Jewish bigotry can be bewildering and bizarre. But given the prejudice’s longevity, virulence and recent resurgence in Europe and America – witness the waves of bomb threats against dozens of Jewish centres nationwide in the past month and the controversy over the Trump administration’s repeated refusal to include Jews in its Holocaust memorial statement – it’s well worth debunking common misconceptions that impede our ability to fight it.
Myth number 1: antiSemitism largely subsided after the Holocaust.
In my time reporting on anti-Semitism, I’ve often encountered a certain wellmeaning scepticism: Didn’t the Holocaust, with its shocking horrors, finally compel society to stamp out anti-Jewish bigotry?
This is depressingly wrong. According to the FBI, Jews in the US are annually subject to the most hate crimes of any religious group, despite constituting only 2 percentof the US population. The picture is darker in Europe, where Jews were the target of 51 percent of racist attacks in France in 2014, even as they made up less than 1 percent of the population. In recent years, synagogues and Jewish schools and museums have been subject to terrorist attacks in France, Denmark and Belgium. A 2013 EU survey found that nearly 40 percentof European Jews fear to publicly identify as Jewish, including 60 percent of Swedish Jews.
Myth number 2: antiSemitism comes predominantly from the right.
This past election season, the ascendant alt-right, a band of white nationalists with a penchant for harassing Jewish journalists, filled Twitter with neo-Nazi memes, Photoshopped reporters into gas chambers and chanted anti-Semitic slogans at rallies. One could be forgiven for assuming such bigotry flows from one political source.
But anti-Semitic outbursts were taking place on the left at the same time. At liberal Oberlin College, a writing instructor named Joy Karega shared memes about Jewish control of the global economy and media, alongside posts asserting Israeli responsibility for Islamic State and 9/11. Yet when officials and others criticised her conduct, the student council dismissed it as a “witch-hunt”. In New York, the hip leftist hub Brooklyn Commons hosted Christopher Bollyn, a conspiracy theorist who argued that “Zionist Jews” were behind 9/11. During the primaries, Jewish candidate Bernie Sanders was confronted by a questioner who declared that “the Zionist Jews . . . run the Federal Reserve, they run Wall Street, they run every campaign”. Surveying this scene, comedian Samantha Bee aired footage of an anti-Semite ranting at a Trump rally, then cracked: “To find anti-Semitism that rabid, you’d have to go to, well, any left-leaning American college campus.”
Hatred of Jews has long thrived on its ability to ensnare opposite worldviews.
Myth number 3: Criticism of Israel is generally anti-Semitic.
The state of Israel often confounds the anti-Semitism conversation. Some assume that an attack on Israel and its policies must necessarily be an attack on Jews; evangelical leader Franklin Graham, for instance, dubbed criticism of Israeli settlers an assault on God’s “chosen people”. Others justify their attacks on Jews around the world by pointing to Israel, claiming to be anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic. Much of this confusion stems from the conflation of all Jews with the state of Israel, its government and its policies.
Criticism of Israel, however, is not necessarily anti-Semitic. In fact, it is a popular pastime in Israel and among Jews across the globe. Objections to settlements or even calls to boycott them are legitimate political positions, not slurs. Israel is a democracy – and can be held to account for its actions, just like any other country.
Myth number 4: Criticism of Israel cannot be anti-Semitic.
At the same time, criticism of the Jewish state can mask malice towards Jews. Some cases are obvious, such as when the organisers of a 2010 flotilla that aimed to breach Israel’s maritime blockade of Gaza subsequently denied the Holocaust and claimed that Israel was behind the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Similarly, those who accuse Israel of committing “Palestinian genocide” when the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics records a four-fold population increase since Israel’s founding, are engaging in libel, not legitimate argument.
In other, less-blatant cases, Israel is subjected to criticism levelled at no non-Jewish country. Consider the United Nations, whose Human Rights Council has condemned Israel more often than all other countries combined, including Syria, North Korea, Iran and Russia. As President Barack Obama’s UN ambassador, Samantha Power, put it, “As long as Israel has been a member of this institution, Israel has been treated differently from other nations at the United Nations.”