A Response to Noam Chomsky’s Book “Fateful Triangle”
by Jay Knott / September 18th, 2010
Hypotheses and Tests
1. Hypotheses
Dear Mr. President: We write to affirm our support for our strategic partnership with Israel, and encourage you to continue to do before international organizations such as the United Nations. The United States has traditionally stood with Israel because it is in our national security interest and must continue to do so. Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East and a vibrant democracy. Israel is also a partner to the United States on military and intelligence issues in this critical region. That is why it is our national interest to support Israel at a moment when Israel faces multiple threats from Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the current regime in Iran.
– Jewish Virtual Library1
This is the beginning of the resolution passed by the US Senate on June 21 2010, supporting Israel’s attack on a convoy of unarmed aid ships headed toward Gaza, which killed nine people.
It begins with four sentences, each one of which asserts that Israel is a strategic asset of the USA. But if Israel is such an ally, why the need to emphasise it? It’s as if the senators are arguing with someone who says that Israel is NOT as useful as we tend to believe. Whoever that is, it’s not Noam Chomsky. Both left-wing thinkers like Chomsky and establishment politicians reinforce the idea that US interests coincide with those of Israel, though they differ on how good US interests are. Sometimes, when people say something too stridently, it is because they secretly know that it is false.
This review was sparked off by an online critique of Noam Chomsky’s views on the Middle East by Jeff Blankfort, a reply to it, and the internet discussions around them.2 , 3 Several contributors to these discussions come from traditional anti-racist left-wing backgrounds, but, unlike most of the left, have taken it to its logical conclusion, opposing Jewish power as the most important form of ethnically-based oppression in the West today.
Chomsky fan Hammond3 urges Blankfort’s supporters to read Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle.4 So I did. I am not impressed by Chomsky’s fame nor by the book’s approximately two thousand references. I look at the arguments.
Professor Chomsky made one of the greatest discoveries in twentieth-century science, the language instinct, in a 1959 critique of psychologist B. F. Skinner.5 Because he’s a genius, we expect more of him than unsubstantiated platitudes. But everyone makes mistakes. Einstein spent the better part of his career trying to explain why the universe is not expanding, and Chomsky didn’t figure out that there are genes for grammar.6
He flayed Skinner on the vagueness of his terms, and for changing the meaning of words when convenient. Chomsky therefore knows that vagueness makes a hypothesis untestable, and therefore unscientific.
Chomsky brought clarity to the science of language development, but he is surprisingly contradictory on the politics of the Middle East, for a man with such a scientific, logical brain. For example, on the one hand, he denies the importance of the Israel Lobby. After all, if Israel is helping US ‘elites’ maintain their ‘hegemony’ in the ‘region’, they would hardly need a lobby to remind them of it. Universities and co-operatives are tentatively discussing a boycott of Israel. Chomsky argues against a boycott of Israeli produce, because the Lobby would call us ‘hypocrites’, unless we boycott the US too.7 So he thinks this ‘unimportant’ Lobby could undermine a boycott of Israel by mere accusations.
By page 4, Chomsky already makes it clear that he defends the Jewish State. He criticizes its current policies, which he says are caused by American Zionists, who cause its “moral degeneration and ultimate destruction”. In my pamphlet The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism, I sarcastically cited Stephen Zunes8 for claiming America was responsible for pushing poor little Israel into Lebanon in 2006. I didn’t realize how close Zunes’s attempt to make excuses for Jewish murderers was to Chomsky’s position until I read Fateful Triangle. Chomsky and his followers want us to believe that Israeli ethnic cleansing has ‘degenerated’ since 1948 because of American influence. This means the Deir Yassin massacre of 1948 was morally superior to those in Lebanon in 1982, but the Hanukkah slaughter of 2008-9 was worse.
He says US ‘support’ has blocked Israel trying more moral policies, to the ‘despair’ of progressive Israeli Jews, on page 442. There is a cruder version of this ‘corruption’ narrative. It is part of the almost universally believed story of Jews as eternal victims. It enables Jewish Americans to support apartheid whilst thinking of themselves as liberals. They blackmail the left into accepting a much softer attitude toward Jewish supremacy than toward white identity.
Chomsky is by no means the worst example of chutzpah in the left. He is contradictory rather than duplicitous. He exposes Jewish emotional blackmail. He is contemptuous of professional Holocaust survivors like Elie Wiesel. He is fearless and merciless at ridiculing the hypocrisy and hysteria for which American Jewish organizations are notorious, who claim that critics of the Lobby are anti-Semitic. Some on the left also harass and slander pro-Palestinian peace activists. Since Israel is the only beneficiary of these divisive tactics, we call them ‘crypto-Zionists’.
But Chomsky’s main weakness is his failure to scientifically test his assertion that Israel is an ally of the USA. On page 3, without evidence, he says that US policy favors “a Greater Israel that will dominate the region in the interests of American power”.
To this end, Chomsky assumes that Arab nationalism is anti-West, whereas Jewish nationalism is pro-West. The former was allied to the Soviet Union. But this is at root a circular argument – the US supports Israel because it is an ally, and Israel is an ally because the US supports it. The reason some Arab leaders temporarily turned to Russia is because they were rejected by America, and the main reason for that is the influence of Israel. Chomsky confuses cause and effect.
The phrase ‘control of the oil’ is thrown around by Chomsky and his circle as liberally as the word ‘region’. It’s a vague leftist feel-good dumbing-down designed to prevent us from thinking through exactly what ‘control’ means, why precisely cruise missiles are useful to oil companies, and if killing Palestinian children helps US interests.
At this point, I should define ‘US interests’. I mean the interests of the US capitalist class. Unconditional support for Israel is obviously against the interests of the majority of Americans, who belong to the proletariat. But in that respect, it doesn’t differ from other unethical US foreign policies. What differentiates Zionism is that it is opposed to the interests of most of the ruling class too.
I used a Marxist phrase there. Chomsky prefers saying ‘elites’ rather than ‘bourgeoisie’ in his bestselling books. Even if the ‘elites’ really do ‘perceive’ it is in US interests to throw seven million dollars a day into a black hole, they are mistaken, and Palestine Solidarity has the task of explaining that to them and to those who work and vote for them.
Chomsky claims that the US supports Israel because Israel supports US war crimes – “Israel showed how to treat third-world upstarts properly” (page 29). This puts the cart before the horse. Right after World War II, Zionists were third-world upstarts themselves, engaged in terrorism in Palestine against an imperialist power. President Truman supported these upstarts, and later, when they were no longer upstarts, president Eisenhower supported upstarts against them.
This shows two things:
1. America doesn’t automatically oppose upstarts, and
2. Israel persuaded America to support its fight against upstarts which threaten Israel, rather than America supporting Israel because it combats upstarts which oppose America.
Israel has never fired a shot in the defense of American interests. But its friends in the media make it look as if the two countries’ enemies are the same, by amalgamating very different Arab and Muslim causes and parties. Most of these oppose Israel in principle – only a very small subset are inherently anti-American. It is in America’s interests to divide them. It is in Israel’s interests to prevent this. And it is in humanity’s interest to divorce America and Israel.
Chomsky’s claim to be a Zionist means a binational state, with the right of ‘self-determination’ of the two nations within Palestine. It’s clear which of the nations would dominate the other, but Chomsky appears to be unaware of this.
To his credit, on page 442 of his book, Chomsky predicted the defeat of the Israeli Defense Forces, which didn’t happen until seven years later, in Lebanon, in 2006. The Gaza flotilla massacre of 2010 was another disastrous error for Israel, leading to a split with Turkey, formerly its most important ally in the ‘region’. There is an opportunity to start to undermine Zionism, the only remaining example of serious racial oppression in the Western world. Is Chomsky on board?
Contradicting his view that Israel obeys America, Chomsky refers to the normal state of politics in the USA as ‘complete obedience’ to Zionist opposition to freedom of speech, on page 337, under the heading ‘The West Falls Into Line’. He also says how the allegation of ‘anti-Semitism’ is used to blackmail the elite political spectrum in Western countries into supporting Jewish supremacy in the Middle East, but then he drops the ball, reiterating hackneyed rhetoric about US policy. It’s not really US policy. It is the policy of supporters of a foreign power pretending to be pro-American.
Note that my argument does not imply promoting patriotism. It means saying, in effect, IF you are a patriotic American, you should oppose your country’s ardent support for Israel. Neither does it imply anti-Semitism. It means recognizing that the interests of most of the inhabitants of the USA would be served by reducing support to Israel. The interests of the Jewish minority would be served by increasing it. This should not be controversial. In particular, the American left, with its keen awareness of ‘privilege’, should be able to listen to this argument. But mostly, it cannot.
At one point, Chomsky discusses the hypocrisy of the Israeli leaders in using pogroms against Jews in Russia in the nineteenth century as an excuse for doing the same thing in Lebanon in 1982. But he doesn’t try to question the view that Jews have always been victims, wherever they have wandered. This myth was reiterated by Republican president George Bush Senior when he was trying to defend himself against the ‘anti-Semitism’ slur by groveling to the Lobby in 1991.
On page 446, Chomsky describes young American Jews, raised on the handouts of the Anti-Defamation League, having a ‘corrupting’ effect on Israel. He must also be very aware of the corruption of Israeli teenagers effected by taking them to the ruins of German concentration camps and teaching them to hate,9 or the Hillel Jewish campus organization which teaches young American Jews that Israel is their homeland. He doesn’t go far enough in criticizing the obsession with ‘the’ Holocaust which gets more intense the further it recedes into history.
After complaining about Israel’s rape of Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties for a few hundred pages, Chomsky resorts to the ‘region’ trick to try to explain it. Page 442:
The US has been more than pleased to acquire a militarized dependency, technologically advanced and ready to undertake tasks that few are willing to endure – support for the Guatemalan genocide, for example – while helping to contain threats to American dominance in the most critical region in the world, where ‘one of the greatest material prizes in world history’ [the Saudi oilfields] must be firmly held.
On page 462, he regrets Israel’s “dependence on the US with the concomitant pressure to serve US interests”. One would expect that the USA would not give a country $7 million a day, more than all other countries combined – without demanding that it serves its interests. But the predictions of this hypothesis fail. Israel feels no pressure at all to serve US interests, and Israeli politicians boast of American subservience, whilst their American accomplices harass those who state this simple truth. This is true whether you are a media mogul, a movie star, a politician, or an anti-war activist.
At the beginning of his book, Chomsky claims that Israel helps the US by protecting the Saudi oilfields. At the end, he says it blackmails the US by threatening to launch a nuclear attack on this great material prize. Iran could also greatly harm the Western world by blocking the Strait of Hormuz through which fleets of oil tankers pass – but somehow, America stands up to Iran. Why can’t it stand up to Israel? Because it’s an asset?
Chomsky expounds a deal of effort showing how the US media is biased in favor of Israel and against Palestinians, but he doesn’t call a spade a spade: the only serious racial prejudice left in America is pro-Jewish bias. That is why Israeli children’s deaths are reported at a rate seven times higher than those of Palestinians.10
2. Tests
I propose testing Chomsky’s views using the time-honored methods of asking
what does the theory predict will happen, and does it actually happen?
is the theory the simplest explanation of what happens?
what would we expect to happen if the theory was not true, and does it actually happen?
is there an alternative theory which better explains what happens?
There are two rival hypotheses:
1. The main reason for the USA’s unconditional support for Israel’s unique persistence in imposing apartheid is that it is in US capitalist interests
2. The main reason for this support is the power of American Jewish organizations
Chomsky defends, with contradictions, the first hypothesis. Mearsheimer and Walt defend the second.
Let’s test each theory using scientific methods. Politics is not an exact science like physics, but we can at least try.
1. The basic principle of science: does Chomsky’s hypothesis4 lead to a simpler explanation of events than Mearsheimer and Walt’s Israel Lobby theory11 ?
2. An abstract test. ‘Abstract’ does not mean ‘vague’, but is scientifically respectable. Without any concrete examples, one can test the Chomsky hypothesis as follows: it is reasonable to say that, for any two nations, they have areas where their interests coincide, and areas where they clash. The USA never acts against Israel’s interests, with some very minor exceptions. This means that, without giving any examples, we can say that America always supports Israel’s interests when their interests collide.
3. Falsification: ask what would be the case if Chomsky’s hypothesis is wrong. What would poor little Israel do if it were NOT serving US interests, if Americans ceased to corrupt it? Would it let the Palestinians back, decommission its nuclear weapons, and abandon its racial definition of citizenship?
4. Which of the arguments depends on the scientific methods outlined above, and which on vague, shifting definitions?
Chomsky makes, without argument, the assertion that if it were not for Israel’s ‘perceived geopolitical role’, a trite, content-free phrase, the Israel Lobby would ‘probably’ be unable to persuade the ‘elite’ to support Israel (page 22). So why do they bother, then? Why do Jews rant and rave in the media about ‘anti-semitic incidents’ whenever anyone in the US makes timid criticism of their country? It’s not that politicians perceive that Israel is an asset, it’s just that they know what happens to those who perceive otherwise – the Lobby makes some calls, and they lose their jobs.12 Chomsky’s theory that Israel is an ally would predict the Israel Lobby would barely exist – real allies of the US like Japan don’t have energetic, well-funded lobbies in Washington DC, ready to call on hordes of faithful followers to phone politicians and write letters to newspapers defending their nations’ interests. They don’t need them. Chomsky’s theory fails the test.
There is more to it than just rich Jewish organizations like the ADL and AIPAC. There is social pressure not to mention the Lobby. Whereas no-one accuses Chomsky of racism for claiming that Jews suffer for the interests of other Western peoples, in complete defiance of the evidence, those of us who point out that the reverse is true, with the facts on our side, are accused of anti-Semitism. If Israel were an asset, there would be no need for this manipulation of our Western European culture, which has a unique record of abandoning racism, despite what the left tells us.
The ‘Israeli Sparta’ argument put forward in the Wall Street Journal etc. by Jewish neo-conservatives posing as classical scholars can easily be disposed of. Sparta defended Greece. Israel does not defend America. On page 21, ignoring the evidence, Chomsky agrees with the pseudo-Hellenists, saying that the Israeli Defence Forces provides a backup for the US armed forces. In fact Israel has never been able to supply soldiers for any US operation in the region. In the Iraq crisis of 1990, Syria gave military support to the US, but not Israel. Israel was unable to respond even when Iraqi missiles landed on Tel Aviv, because it would have split the coalition invading Iraq. Chomsky’s argument fails the test.
Chomsky reviewed The Israel Lobby when it broke through the censors of the US liberal left.13 “Another problem that Mearsheimer and Walt do not address is the role of the energy corporations. They are hardly marginal in US political life… How can they be so impotent in the face of the Lobby?” he asks.14 Chomsky’s review of The Israel Lobby implies the oil companies CANNOT be powerless in the face of a mere lobby. But the assumptions behind Chomsky’s question don’t stand up. Mearsheimer and Walt DO address the role of these companies, explaining how, if they had their way, US policy in the Middle East would change. Leftists in America half-adopt Karl Marx’s ‘materialist conception of history’ without naming it (they say ‘corporate greed’ instead). It is one of the few aspects of Marxism which can be tested, and it fails miserably to explain the US position on the Israel/Palestine question. The interests of big corporations do not lead to invading Lebanon, persecuting Palestine, and stirring up Islamic extremism.
Why has the US consistently supported Israel, and inconsistently supported Arab nationalists? Egypt’s Nasser, Iraq’s Hussein and Syria’s al-Assad all had a pretty good record of keeping down ‘upstarts’, particularly radical Islamic ones, so why not, according to Chomsky’s logic, ally with the radical Arab nationalist states? The US has allied with various Middle Eastern states at various times, but only its support for Israel is invariant. Again, these questions constitute a test of Chomsky’s hypothesis. You try to figure out what the hypothesis would predict, then try to find counter-examples, where the actual events are incompatible with the predicted ones. It isn’t difficult, particularly in this case.
Chomsky claims that one reason America supports Israel is because it is a ‘laboratory’ for US military and surveillance technology. This is easily tested by asking if any other country would be eager to take Israel’s place.
The argument that oil is the main reason for US support for Israel is too trivial to waste time on. When America attacks a Middle Eastern country, the left chants ‘no war for oil’. If the policy causes the price of oil to drop, capitalism benefits. If the price rises, the oil companies benefit. Either way, the left trumpets the evidence. The ‘oil’ explanation cannot be falsified. It is not wrong – it is not even a valid hypothesis.
In a similar violation of scientific methodology, Chomsky tries to use the fact that the USA approves of Israeli war crimes as evidence that the dog wags the tail, that Israel serves Uncle Sam. In fact, this ‘evidence’ contributes nothing at all to our understanding of the relationship between the two states. It is equally compatible with the two opposing arguments, so it is not a test which selects which of them are true. Chomsky does give some of the same examples of American subservience as Mearsheimer and Walt in The Israel Lobby:
– US presidents mildly criticize Israel building settlements on Palestinian land
– Israeli politicians express open contempt for the supposedly most powerful man in the world, bragging of how ‘The Jewish Lobby’ (their words) will bring this uppity goy into line
– And so it comes to pass
but Chomsky doesn’t ask the obvious question: is this all
1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel in order to cover up for white/US/capitalist hegemony, by diverting attention to the Jews, or
2. is the most elegant/economical/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps Western European interests in the USA?
By means of the Lobby, the tail wags the dog. Its the simplest, clearest, and most economical explanation of the facts. This is how science progresses. A good example of why simpler is better can be found in a recent paper on the evolution of social insects such as ants and bees.15 We should try to use the same criterion in the study of human societies.
Like everything else, the question of Jewish control of the media can be approached emotionally. I prefer the scientific approach. I approach the argument about Jewish control of the press, etc., on its merits, not on how much it reminds people of ancient Tsarist calumnies. Surely the most simple explanation of the fact that
Israel has been granted a unique immunity from criticism in mainstream journalism and scholarship. (page 31)
is because Jews are overrepresented in mainstream journalism and scholarship, and quite a few of these Jews defend Jewish interests. This kind of statement is acceptable in Israel, whose inhabitants are mostly proud of what they call ‘the Jewish Lobby’ in America. It is acceptable in countries like Malaysia. Why is it so difficult for us?
The answer is obvious. We are afraid of being anti-Semitic. I found a solution to this problem. I stopped caring about it.
The Israel Lobby, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, August 2007. [↩]
They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby, Paul Findlay, Lawrence Hill Books, 1989. [↩]
The Atlantic magazine rejected the original ‘Israel Lobby’ paper, on the transparently false grounds of ‘poor scholarship’. When it came out as a book, the authors toured the USA to promote it, but found that local papers didn’t send reporters to cover it. The Lobby demonstrated the authors’ hypothesis by trying to suppress it. [↩]
A Victorian bishop’s wife allegedly reacted to Darwin’s findings as follows: “My dear, descended from the apes! Let us hope it is not true, but if it is, let us pray that it will not become generally known.”1
In this article, I consider three books which claim races and nations are “constructed”: Imagined Communities, by Benedict Anderson,2The Invention of the Jewish People, by Shlomo Sand,3 and The Invention of the White Race, by Theodore Allen.4 The latter work was positively reviewed on Counterpunch.5 However, I aim to show that evolutionary approaches are better at explaining both ethnic and national identity than the methodology used by these authors.
Benedict Anderson’s famous account of the origins of nationalism, Imagined Communities begins with an extract from a poem by Daniel Defoe:
Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman: In eager rapes, and furious lust begot, Betwixt a painted Briton and a Scot… From whence a mongrel half-bred race there came, … Infus’d betwixt a Saxon and a Dane…
Defoe’s intention was to defend the king of England, who was Dutch, against xenophobic criticism: “we don’t belong to one race, so how can we demand that our king belongs to it?”
More recently, John Barnes made a strong case for rejecting the concept of biological race: ‘Racism came from the idea of race, which is a man-made construct. Race is not scientific or genetic. It does not actually exist. Race came about to validate and justify colonialism and slavery.’6
Shlomo Sand’s The Invention of the Jewish People agrees with the idea that race is a “construct” which deceives people into believing they have common interests. Sand’s specific claim is that the majority of the world’s Jews have no ancestors who lived in Palestine, and that therefore the state of Israel is based on a lie. For a few centuries after Christ, he claims, Judaism actively sought converts. He says it’s not true that Jews were thrown out of Palestine and then wandered the world for two thousand years – rather, a few who left voluntarily converted many, including the whole nation of the Khazars, located by the Crimean sea. Many of the Khazars’ descendants ended up in Europe.
Though popular in Palestine solidarity circles, Sand accepts that his work has had no effect on Israeli nationalism nor on Jewish identity worldwide. Why is this so? If you expose a delusion, wouldn’t you expect significant numbers to abandon it, and thank you?
The argument of Theodore Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race, is another contribution to the view that racial identity is a cultural construction. He argues that white Americans weren’t originally “racist” toward black ones, but they were taught to be by their rulers, because the latter had an interest in keeping their subjects divided.
Anderson, Sand, and Allen are all left-wing academics. In attempting to show weaknesses in their arguments, I am going to make selective use of the work of two very right-wing scholars, Frank Salter and Kevin MacDonald. This should not be seen as an endorsement of their politics.
For example, Frank Salter, the author of Genetic Interests,7 is a white Australian who opposes immigration from the developing world into “his” country. I completely reject this opinion, agreeing instead with left-wing Australian journalist John Pilger on this question.8 Considering how white Australia was founded, it’s unethical to try to stop third world refugees settling there.
American evolutionary historian professor Kevin MacDonald is also a right-winger. His Evolutionary Strategies of Ethnocentric Behavior9 argues that “ethnic affiliations are extraordinarily robust” and that this is because racial identity is biologically beneficial to the genes which cause it.
But the notion that racial identity is adaptive does not imply that it is morally justifiable, any more than accepting the obvious fact that heterosexuality is more adaptive than homosexuality has any consequences whatever for one’s views on gay rights.
To put it another way, lack of empathy with Salter’s and MacDonald’s political views is no reason at all to reject their factual assertions, which they claim are based on science.
Salter’s demonstration that ethnic identity is adaptive,7 and MacDonald’s attempt to use evolutionary psychology to explain ethnic conflict,9 stand independently, and have to be approached like any other theory which claims to be scientific.
And regardless of the views of MacDonald and Salter, a more fundamental influence on my perspective is the work of evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, who happens to be a leftist. His recent book The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life10 provides a solid foundation for understanding the Darwinian approach to human beliefs and behavior. Genes “deceive” us into working to make copies of themselves. This is a key to working out a scientific explanation for the appeal of nationalism.
Benedict Anderson argues that nations are “imagined communities.” But, if you claim that some national identities are completely invented, for example, Indonesian, you concede that some are less so. The fact that nations, unlike tribes, have the characteristic that most of its members will never meet each other – one of Anderson’s central motifs – doesn’t seem to me to be as important as it does to him.
Human beings may feel strong ethnic identity with people whom they’ll never meet. For example, white Britons often feel above-average empathy with white Australians, on the other side of the world. This feeling is conceivably an extension of tribal identity, which might be explained as an adaptive trait which evolved during the Stone Age.
Theodore Allen’s argument is the antithesis of the above speculation; an uncompromising example of class-based leftism. He believes that “whiteness” is an “ideology”. He thinks working-class Americans of European origin have often been victims of a capitalist strategy to divide the poor by making some of them feel they have “white privilege.” He tries to prove his thesis by aggregating facts which he thinks conform to it. On page 215, he claims that because there was a revolt of both African and European laborers against their employers in 1676 this is “supreme proof that the white race did not exist.” It proves nothing of the sort. The fact that the degree of white identity went up and down says nothing about whether it ever corresponded to real interests.
Why did some poor Americans accept that they belong to “the white race” if their only interests were class interests, as Allen argues? How did the ruling class manage to persuade them they have ethnic interests too?
In complete contrast, Kevin MacDonald tries to show that ethnic identity has a biological basis. Among other examples, he cites Pierre van den Berghe to the effect that “many ethnic groupings are remarkably stable; the Flemings and Walloons of Belgium are ‘almost exactly where their ancestors were when Julius Caesar wrote De Bello Gallico.‘”
Frank Salter relocates this argument on scientific grounds, in his book, Genetic Interests.7
Most readers will have no difficulty with the argument that the maternal instinct can be explained by the fact that, since large female mammals have few offspring, it is adaptive for the genes in those mammals to produce caring for each of those offspring, in preference to non-relatives.
Yet we know that we share most of our genes – over ninety-nine percent – with all other human beings, and up to ninety-six percent with other apes.
Salter’s theory says that what makes our genes code for preferring one individual over another is the difference in our relatedness to each of those two individuals.11
It’s only the genes which differ between individuals which count. Of the genes which differ, those in our relatives are more likely to be copies of our own.
This is why we are altruistic to our kin.
Evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane worked out that it makes genetic sense to die for two or more brothers or sisters, or eight or more first cousins, but not fewer.
But the percentage genetic advantage in choosing to be altruistic toward an individual from among millions of people somewhat related to you, over someone much more distantly related, is about the same as that in choosing to be altruistic to your relatives over individuals in those millions of somewhat related people. That is one explanation of ethnic identity.
So what about nationalism?
Anderson claims that nationalism arose among the creoles – upper-class colonials like Washington and Bolivar – anddescribes in great detail the appropriation of ancient buildings by modern nations, the rise of national languages via newspapers and novels, and so on. But this all fails to answer the question with which he begins his book – why are so many people prepared to die for “their” nation?
“This style of imagining did not come out of thin air” he writes (page 189) but he doesn’t explain where it did come from. Anderson argues nationalism evolved in Latin America partly as a result of the way the Spanish Empire was administered. For example, a functionary from Medellin (in Colombia) was able to win promotion to Bogota (also in Colombia), but not to Caracas (in Venezuela). But why would this lead to deep feelings of identity with Colombia and not Venezuela?
Wars between the “liberated” South American states have been among the worst in history. Why would anyone risk their life for Paraguay versus Uruguay? Saying that the poor are victims of “bourgeois ideology” when they line up outside recruiting stations merely says that some people manage to convince others that their interests coincide, when they don’t. It doesn’t say how they manage to achieve this.
In chapter five of his book, Shlomo Sand tries to discredit Zionism and the conception of Jews as a race, by showing how it had much in common with the crude racist theories of its time, including National Socialism. Sand puts “language and culture” before “biology”, and expresses as much instinctive hostility to Darwinism as a bishop’s wife. But where do language and culture come from, if not from our genes? You can’t say cultural artifacts are produced by culture ad infinitum; at some point, you have to explain culture without reference to itself.
Sand’s dismissal of a Darwinist approach relies heavily on selecting the worst of its mistakes from the early 20th century. But evolutionary theory, applied to human beings, has made advances subsequently. On page 266 Sand disagrees with Sandler’s claim that Jews in effect have become a “racial entity”. But strong feelings of Jewish identity exist. Will informing Western Jews they are really Khazars, and have no connection with Palestine, undermine support among many of them for the ongoing ethnic cleansing of that country?
Isn’t it possible that, “in effect”, genes for ethnic identity which arose during the Stone Age because it was adaptive, can “deceive”10 individuals into feeling more related than they really are? And that this is the most economical explanation of the old lie “dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori”?
Feelings of ethnic identity can be mistaken. But if there is ethnic solidarity among initially unrelated people, intramarriage will gradually make that solidarity more adaptive.
The fact that races difficult to define and are fuzzy at the edges doesn’t make the concept “race” meaningless, as “anti-racists” often aver. Families are fuzzy too. Do your second cousins, who share two great-grandparents with you, belong to your family? It’s a question of degree.
But one can be more precise. Just as one can calculate exactly how many cousins it is worth (from the point of view of genes) laying down one’s life for, one’s race is the set of people with whom it is adaptive for one to ethnically identify.
Thus, in peaceful times, it might be adaptive for Walloons to distinguish themselves from Flemings. But when the Romans invaded, this may have changed.
This approach would have explanatory power even if the whole of humankind could be arranged in a spectrum in which any two neighboring people were genetically equidistant. By this, I mean that, for any individual, copies of his genes would be as likely to survive, if he died for the person to his left, as for the person to his right. Of course, this is a thought experiment.
When Genghis Khan’s grandsons invaded Europe, alleles in Europe’s inhabitants which coded for European identity would be more likely to cause copies of themselves than alleles which did not.
The reader may doubt that such genes exist. Further research, if the political climate allowed, might be able to find out.
Some leftists have had an uneasy relationship with defenders of an evolutionary approach to human nature.
Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon’s autobiography describes a lifetime of facing up to left-wing hostility to Darwinism in academia.12 In chapter 14, Chagnon gives a detailed account of what he calls “Twilight in Cultural Anthropology: Postmodernism and Radical Anthropology Supplant Science”. He details unscholarly attacks on his findings, which were inconvenient for the dominant trend in anthropology, the school of Franz Boas and his followers, like Margaret Mead and Marshall Sahlins. On pages 386-387, Chagnon describes a particular low point, an organized physical attack on leading Darwinist scholar Edward Wilson. In 2000, a left-wing journalist published a book of outrageous libels against Chagnon. Though the claims of the book were ridiculous, and the American Anthropological Association’s leaders knew they were ridiculous, they nevertheless had to pretend to take them seriously, for political reasons. I witnessed this first-hand at their meeting in San Francisco.
This is unfortunate. A realistic view of race and nation should begin with the observation that human beings are the products of evolution by means of natural selection.
Tim Wise is a dedicated campaigner against what he calls ‘white supremacy’. He tours the country talking about it, and has written several books on the subject. This book is his personal story, how he came to be who he is now.
Wise makes three big mistakes:
1. He confuses CLASS and RACE
2. He confuses STATISTICS and STEREOTYPES
3. He ignores the Jewish question.
He interprets everything in terms of anti-racism. Remember the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995? The initial press reaction to this atrocity was to suggest the most likely suspects for terrorism would be Middle Eastern. Then Timothy McVeigh was arrested, and immediately, without waiting for evidence, the anti-racist left celebrated – he was white, right-wing, and had an Army haircut. It turns out that he and his fellow conspirator Terry Nichols were guilty, but the lefties didn’t wait for the verdict before trumpeting their conclusion that the only reason the media thought it might be Middle Eastern terrorists is because the media are racist. So, after Oklahoma City, the press was concerned not to allege Muslims are the most likely people to commit terrorist attacks in America, that it is more likely to be home-grown white extremists.
If Oklahoma City seemed to confirm Wise’s perspective, the much greater tragedy of September 11th did the opposite. It is testimony to the strength of his convictions that he doesn’t notice this.
Wise makes much of ethnic or religious profiling since September 11th, failing to notice the effort airport security has made to avoid profiling – because it’s illegal. Any white person made to walk through the ‘sniffing’ machine, as I have on more than one occasion, can testify to this effort. I, another white man, and a middle-aged white woman in a business suit, were the only ones singled out on one flight I particularly remember. Wise is mistaken – even 9/11 didn’t provoke the West into ethnic profiling. Except Israel, but accusing Israel of profiling is like saying Roman Polanski has a penchant for young ladies. In the US, airport security is obliged to prove it is not profiling, just like mortgage lenders were forced to make unwise loans to prove they were not bigoted. Hence what the left calls the ‘capitalist crisis’. But I digress…
Racism is often described as ‘judging people by the color of their skin‘, after a simplistic homily by Saint Martin Luther King. In practice, it often just means making a statistical calculation. You might avoid a particular street, not because you think all black kids are muggers, but because you know there is a positive correlation between black kids and mugging. Moreover, there is the ‘weighting’ problem. The consequences of erring on the side of liberalism, and being wrong, may be greater than erring on the side of a more conservative standpoint, and being wrong. Many so-called ‘racists’ might just be good statisticians. ‘Anti-racism’ stops us thinking through these hard issues by numbing us and dumbing us down with schmaltzy moralism.
Profiling is a trade-off. We are prepared to tolerate considerable inconvenience to avoid airport security singling out Muslim-looking people. I agree with this approach. In the case of baby-sitters, we err in the opposite direction – you are allowed to advertise for a female child-minder, although this profiles against the majority of men, who are not a danger to children. I’m not complaining, though I lose out in both examples!
In the case of cops stopping people for ‘driving while black’, it’s often simpler than Wise believes. If they are allowed to, the police will indeed discriminate against black people, because, statistically, they are more likely to be criminals, just as men are more likely to be child-molesters. However, if we decide to make the trade-off in the same direction as we do with airport security, the police will not be allowed to make such a statistical calculation, and the white majority will have to tolerate the inconvenience.
This is not to deny police racism exists. I was stopped by the Portland police for turning without a signal. The pig didn’t even give me a ticket. James Perez, who was black, was not so lucky – they shot him dead for doing the same thing, though he was unarmed. Clearly, that was an example of racial discrimination. To address this problem, the cops could do one of two things
1. shoot less black people
2. shoot more white people
or, if they are really serious about eradicating racism, both. Wise’s logic leads to this conclusion – he argues that, to the extent that black people are oppressed, white people are privileged. At this point, I could talk about how his argument is ‘class-divisive’, and show how it undermines the working class as much as white racism does, but I’m bored with that sort of thing, having tried to do it for thirty years. Karl Marx couldn’t come up with a logically coherent, scientific version of this idea: I doubt if I can. Anyway, deconstructing critical race theory is more fun, and somehow, more anti-establishment.
Imagine a white woman walking to Los Angeles Greyhound bus station at twilight. A shortcut would take her through an alley containing several young black men. If she avoids the alley, she may miss her bus. What should she do? In this case, I have no hesitation in advocating ethnic and gender profiling. I would advise her not to take the high road, and the dark alley. Many people I know are often faced with this kind of dilemma. I hope they listen to me rather than Tim Wise. Alert readers will ask: why did I say ‘white woman’ – why does her race matter? Because she might worry about being a racist. A young black woman wouldn’t think twice about avoiding that alley. And why did I mention the ethnicity of the young men in the alley? Because it is useful to the woman in making her calculation.
That’s statistics. I don’t think most Muslims hijack planes, or most black men are muggers. But they are more likely to be these things than their demographic complements.
If it weren’t for his Jewish background and the relatively benign attitude to Zionism, as opposed to white racism, of he and his ‘anti-racist’ comrades, I’d say Wise is a guilty white man. But its more than that. The American anti-racist industry is too close to Jewish power. It attacks critics of Zionism as ‘anti-Semitic’ in alliance with open Zionists. It uncritically copies disinformation from Zionist sources. It disrupts allegedly racist white speakers by cooperating with really racist rabbis. When ‘calling people out’ doesn’t work, these children of Stalinism and Zionism use threats, violence and slander, justifying their tactics by thinking they’re fighting the ultimate evil – white racism.
Wise’s story contains traces of the use of ‘feelings’ politics, and how some people need a ‘safe space’ etc., politics which have been used to undermine radical groups. Some of us in Portland have been targeted by the safe-space soft-Stalinists lately. It’s so vague, it’s impossible to defend yourself. How can I counter the argument of a ‘minority person’ who says she needs a ‘safe space’ to avoid my ‘racism sexism homophobia able-ism class-ism patriarchy heterosexism and male violence’ (actual quote)?
Seriously, Wise believes in the technique known as ‘calling out’. This is a way of saying “I disagree with you” without giving the other person the opportunity to reply, as we do in our Anglo-Saxon, liberal, scientific society. It’s an attempt to use moral blackmail to delegitimize your opponent’s view. But the universe was not socially constructed, and factual correctness is completely independent of political correctness.
Submission to this blackmail paralyzes thinking rationally about social problems. If I explained that I understand that the British working class has been, to some extent, its own worst enemy, nobody would ‘call me out’. This class perpetuated alcoholism, domestic violence, and hedonism, hangovers from its miserable origins in the factories, mills and mines of the industrial revolution, long after its standard of living had improved. But if I said something similar about the black American proletariat, people like Wise would say I’m being racist. They would distort and simplify my words to make it sound like I’m saying that black people are entirely to blame for their problems. He really makes that dishonest simplification in the book. I used to think political correctness was a class strategy – a way of keeping the poor in their place by turning black people against their ‘privileged’ white working class neighbors. But that wouldn’t explain that it is not universal – it is specific to the part of the left which intersects with the most powerful ethnic lobby in America.
The most influential American leftist is probably Noam Chomsky. He was a keen opponent of South African apartheid, but is much weaker on the Israel question. In particular, he’s a ‘Lobby Denier’. He tries to hold back the one understanding which is essential to save the Palestinians. Jews like Chomsky often try to prevent this insight by claiming that concern about the Lobby is ‘racist’. Leftists will say that what I just said is racist too. The fact that I got my critique of Chomsky’s blind spots from Jewish leftists Neumann and Blankfort proves nothing, of course: http://www.leftcurve.org/LC29WebPages/Chomsky.html.
Wise confuses cause and effect. Much is said about ‘environmental racism’. For example, if the authorities build a new freeway through a city, they usually go through the most black area, dividing communities, cutting people off from their relatives, shops, hospitals, etc.. But this is not because the urban planners don’t like black people, it’s because it’s cheaper to go through the poorest area, to compulsorily purchase the houses they are going to knock down. Police officers, if they are allowed to, will practice ethnic profiling. So would airport security. It’s not necessarily because they are xenophobic, its just more efficient to use whatever statistical methods you can when you are allowed to. Policemen intercept gangs of boys more readily than gangs of girls, and for good reason.
Oxford Town, Oxford Town…
Wise’s confusion of class and race is almost too obvious to point out. It used to be a commonplace in England that the police would treat students at prestigious Oxford university completely differently to the local working-class lads. The students in the old days were invariably well-off, and the police would let them get away with all manner of nocturnal pranks, but not the horny-handed sons of Oxford’s auto workers. All – pigs, patricians and plebs – were white. The police knew their job – suck up to the rich, and oppress the poor. American cops, treating black kids differently, are partially exhibiting a class distinction, a result of their role, enforcing property relations in a capitalist society. In Oxford, England, class is clear, but in Oxford, Mississippi, people like Wise can claim that American society is based more on race than on class. If the rulers of the country really had made more money out of slavery than wage labor, it’s surprising that they replaced the former with the latter.
He advises white people to “refuse to accept jobs that came your way thanks to personal connections, unless those same connections are also open to persons of color” – but – do I need to spell it out? – he doesn’t appeal to Jews to make the same sacrifice. He doesn’t need to – he can rely on paranoia about anti-Semitism to stop people from muttering about clannish behavior. He appeals to whites to make sacrifices (page 118) but says nothing about Jewish privilege; only about the history of the oppression of Jews. It would be difficult to discuss with Wise the issue of whether Jews have always been victims, a fair subject if you really want to oppose racism, especially Zionism.
But Western Civilization today generally errs on the side of political correctness. The major exception is Israel, the only overtly racist country in the Western world. The only country whose immigration controls are so ethnocentric, it won’t even let the original inhabitants back in – but it would welcome Tim Wise with open arms. The only country which depends on white guilt, the ideology promoted by Tim Wise. German politicians are quite explicit about this guilt, but it is also a powerful force in the other Western countries, especially the USA.
In his chapter on what he calls ‘White Denial’, Wise describes a ‘psychologist’ from the 1850’s who claimed that runaway slaves were suffering from a mental illness, which he called ‘drapetomania’ (page 63). Wise rightly condemns this self-serving nonsense. But more influential in psychology today is a book written a hundred years later by a group of Jewish-identified left-wing anti-racists, “The Authoritarian Personality“. This work blatantly pathologizes normal white American families, which it claims suffer from ‘ego-alien dependency syndrome’ and all sorts of other things. Concern to marry within one’s ethnic group is pathological in white Europeans, according to this work, but normal in Jews. Wanting to marry a girl who seems uninterested in sex – thus more likely to remain faithful – is not a manifestation of a man’s genetic interest in certainty of paternity. No, it’s the result of sexual repression. Especially if you’re white. Gentile suspicion of Jews is a sign of mental instability, but not the other way round. And so on.
Wise only goes into his Jewish background twice, once at the beginning and once at the end. In both cases, it is in the context of the history of oppression against Jews. Despite being Jewish, he tells us, he has the ‘privileges’ of being white. The idea that Jews have specific privileges in Western societies today doesn’t cross his mind. He is proud of his grandparents who were so much more liberal toward black people than most of Nashville’s white people. Jews were way over-represented in the civil rights movement – they perceived it was in their interests.
White Europeans today are among the least xenophobic people who have ever lived. No other ethnic group has been recorded voluntarily relinquishing so much privilege. Look at the fate of apartheid South Africa compared to apartheid Israel. Wise does not notice this, for some reason. Obviously, this does not mean I am saying that white people should become racist. Naturally, leftists will claim that this is exactly what I am saying.
Like all left-wing ‘anti-racists’, Wise goes on about ‘hate crimes’ like burning crosses and swastikas without once mentioning that the majority of these crimes are committed by black, Jewish and white anti-racist activists. In the last year, at the time of writing (April 2010), there have been swastikas painted inside two colleges in Portland, UC Davis, and the University of Oregon. A ‘minority student’ confessed to hanging a noose and a white hood at UC San Diego. This is certainly a fake hate crime, and the others, probably. Universities are not full of Nazis.
He mentions college fraternities being hotbeds of racism without discussing the campaign against the white frat-boys at Duke University in 2006, carried out by black activists, feminists and guilty white liberals, banging pots outside their house, and calling for them to be castrated, for a crime they didn’t commit. To not care about this terrible injustice, which happened in his neck of the woods, spurred on by the ideology he spends his life defending, Tim Wise must seethe with hate.
Wise isn’t just Jewish, he’s also descended from British white people. But when he describes the achievement of these ancestors, sailing from Britain to Bermuda and Virginia, it is only to put them down as racists – in noticeable contrast to his pride in his Russian Jewish forebears. He grudgingly admits that the British abolished slavery in 1833, but says nothing of the white men who died liberating the slaves in the war between the states, 1861-64. The only comparable conflict for American white working class men was World War Two, when again they fought and died fighting against a cause more racist than their own, at Omaha Beach and the Bulge, 1944. Admittedly, they didn’t exactly volunteer for either of these crusades, but then, why should they, for a cause not theirs? This statement is true from both a class and a racial perspective – why assume the consequences of these approaches are mutually exclusive? Since then, white Americans have made many more concessions to other ethnic groups – but still Wise lashes them with guilt.
According to Wise, the authorities in Bermuda are racist because they import white guest workers to keep the island white. Brimming with chutzpah, he doesn’t notice the supreme irony of this remark. He has to travel a thousand miles to find a place which imports whites, when there are already local black people able to do the jobs – everywhere else in the Western world, it’s the opposite! When you have to go out of your way to clutch desperately at the one example which conforms to your hypothesis, it’s time to try falsifying it. He wouldn’t have to go far to do that.
He grew up in the South in the seventies. It was racist, he says. If there’s one thing we already know, that’s it. The dominant culture sneers at white Southerners. Even Zionist comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen’s movies spend more time parodying white people than Muslims. It’s not just humor. It’s not just lightweight popular culture. It has a message. Wise claims there are no negative stereotypes about white people’s intelligence, only black people’s. In fact, Hollywood is a production-line of prejudice against Christian white people, especially Germans. The media attacks the Pope but make excuses for Roman Polanski, who was convicted of what the His Holiness is merely alleged to have covered up. They had a field day with George W Bush’s Texan accent and verbal ineptitude. This Jewish anti-white prejudice is openly discussed by honest Jewish writers like Philip Roth, whose upbringing treated white gentiles as being intellectually inferior to Jews. Wise illustrates what he writes about – the blindness of privilege – but he suffers from ‘denial’.
The South was racist. Compared to today. That means it got better. Compared to today, Lincoln was a racist. So what do we call the people who died fighting for his cause? It is ahistorical to say “this is racist, that’s racist”. In what direction has the USA and the rest of Western Society evolved over the last 150 years? With fits and starts, it has traveled in a progressive direction. Actually, there is one exception, and it’s not Bermuda. The West is unique in this respect. Chinese people don’t have a problem being xenophobic (travel to Western China if you want to find out). Neither do the inhabitants of the Amazon jungle. Nor Jews. Wise thinks his contempt for Minnesotans is pro-black, but in fact, it’s pro-Jewish.
Wiesel Words
Instead of going round the country honestly promoting his ethnic agenda like a Zionist, or discussing his theory with its critics in accord with the Western academic tradition, it’s all about ‘educating’ and ‘doing anti-racist work’. This sounds reasonable enough, but look more closely: it assumes he is right. True researchers defending a theory don’t say they are educating people. They invite others to attack the theory as hard as possible. That’s the scientific approach. In contrast, Wise wants to be a guru. Ever so nicely, he’s telling you he’s right, and you’d better agree, otherwise you are ‘in white denial’. It’s an approach favored by cults like psychoanalysis or the Communist Party. It’s alien to our open, Anglo-Saxon culture, and we should be aware of this.
He complains that for most white folks, resisting white supremacy is probably the last thing on their minds. It’s true that they find it hard to resist – they already abolished it! Now we need to get to work on Jewish power, the one remaining racialist force in the Western world.
If Wise really were a self-identified white European as he claims, he would have a lot of problems. In a way, I prefer that he is a Jew defending his ethnic interests by deception (which includes self-deception) – at least there is a Darwinian explanation – it’s healthy. It’s also healthy for the rest of us to oppose it.
Otherwise, it would be nauseating, rather than amusing, to read his painstaking account of how parents ought to teach children to deconstruct Disney movies: “Pocahontas… appeals to European standards of beauty and to remain acceptable to a mostly white viewing audience. And of course, she shows a lot of leg… It is a stunning lesson in the way white supremacy works”.
Some of Disney’s movies are deeper than crude leftists like Wise, always on the lookout for stereotypes, realize. Armed with a more sophisticated approach, based on the work of Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight, I was able to enjoy “Beauty and the Beast” and relate it to Levi-Strauss’s story of the origins of mythology.
Wise supports affirmative action to promote black people and Latinos into places which might otherwise go to white people, but he does not advocate the same to raise white people into positions held, unfairly, if we apply his criteria consistenly, by Jews. These include a disproportionate number of college places and professorships, legal positions, Hollywood owners and directors, and newspaper and TV executives. Why not advocate affirmative action to address this imbalance?
Naturally, this argument will be called ‘anti-Semitic’. But that only proves my point. Applying exactly the same principles Wise applies to one privileged group, we are not allowed to apply to another. Jews are more privileged, because, in addition to the usual privileges, they have the privilege that no-one dare call them privileged.
“White Like Me” is a painful book. It says a lot about Wise’s family background in Tennessee, how he is raising his children to be aware, etc.. He doesn’t subscribe to the view that parents are entitled to be less progressive raising their children than they are in society in general. For example, I would argue that a white couple should feel no guilt about sending their children across town to avoid a largely black school. This would be the exact opposite of the ‘busing’ disaster of the seventies and eighties, which promoted racism by forcing middle-class white children to be exposed to bad black ghetto kids. Sorry for the bluntness, but that’s what happened. The reason I defend retrogressive parents is that genes are reactionary. What you want for your own children is the best, and your liberal principles can take a rain check. I’d go so far as to say I would try to maneuver a daughter into meeting nice white boys to avoid the potential damage of interracial marriage, though I have no objection to race-mixing in principle. This society demonizes attitudes in white people which it allows in Jews. The Los Angeles Times reports calmly that a Jewish newspaper publishes letters criticizing interracial marriage between Jews and blacks, but the Times would not publish a letter criticizing white/black hookups. So much for ‘institutionalized white racism‘. So much for Wise’s hypocritical theory.
His analysis of the tendency of young teenage black kids to gang up misses a lot. It assumes they are reacting to real racism, disregarding the fact that this behavior is hardly less prominent than it was when white society was more ethnocentric. This behavior was as pronounced in London in the nineties as it was in Nashville in the seventies (I base this on my experience as well as Wise’s). He makes no allowance for the idea that kids can be manipulative, but their crude attempts to manipulate guilt are easier to see through than some of their adult counterparts, like Willie Brown, mayor of San Francisco, who was always ready to play the race card at the drop of a hat, knowing the city was populated mostly with white liberals raised on the educational efforts of people like Wise. Furthermore, Wise’s story doesn’t raise the notion that there might be a Darwinian basis to ethnic identity. Those black kids might be expressing their genes. Such behavior might have been adaptive during our evolution. Perhaps it wasn’t the Garden of Eden after all.
Wise was a campaigner against white apartheid in South Africa, but he only pays token attention to apartheid in Israel. He boasts of a communication from Desmond Tutu. Is he aware that Tutu said Israel is worse than apartheid? Recently, the leader of South Africa’s Afrikaaner movement, Eugene Terre`Blanche, was murdered. He was the most extreme white leader in South Africa. He advocated a two-state solution; a small white state next to a large black one. South Africa chose a one-state solution, in which each citizen is theoretically equal. An Israeli equivalent of Terre`Blanche would be considered a progressive – apartheid Israel resists a two-state solution, in which the Jews would get the lion’s share. Even that is too radical for them. A far-right white Afrikaaner is the equivalent of a progressive Israeli Jew. You won’t hear that from the likes of Wise. In fact he would condemn me as bigoted for saying this, and some of his followers would threaten me. So much for ‘white supremacy‘. So much for Wise’s dishonest theory.
“By 1985, the divestment movement, as it came to be known, was in full swing on dozens of college and university campuses across the country” (page 137)
Twenty-five years later, it is hard to get a similar divestment movement against Jewish apartheid, because rich right-wing Jews like Alan Dershowitz sue any college which even thinks about it, and left-wing Jews like Wise confuse the issue by telling us to worry about ‘anti-Semites in our midst‘, though they were not concerned about ‘anti-whites’ during the struggle against white apartheid.
When he tells how a black student asks ‘what are you doing about apartheid in Nashville?‘, he admits that he and his white comrades concentrated on apartheid in South Africa, forgetting to lobby for affirmative action and the creation of an African American studies center at the university – not because the first was infinitely more significant than the other two, but because, he claims, it was ‘easier’. Easier still is his privileging of the fight against white apartheid over the much more difficult task of the defeat of Jewish apartheid. The first of these only required persuading the US government to ditch an important ally; the second involves confronting the Lobby. It also involves criticizing the current version of anti-racism. It’s oddly counter-intuitive and un-Marxist, the way capitalism works.
Wise responded to the black student’s pointed remark by linking the battle against apartheid to the struggle against racism in the USA by means of advocating the intensification of affirmative action. Imagine campaigning for the equivalent, linking Israeli apartheid to Jewish ethnic power in the USA by advocating affirmative action against Jews. Affirmative action is always against someone to exactly the same degree it is for someone else. Suppose I showed up at one of his talks and said ‘what are you doing about Jewish power’? Do you think he’d listen respectfully?
He criticizes ‘white leftists‘ for “marching against a war on the other side of the world” and refusing to draw the connection between this war and “racism at home“. But when we talk about the connection between the war in Iraq and the Jewish neo-conservative movement, these same white leftists defend the status quo by calling us ‘anti-Semitic’.
By the way, I am not complaining about Jewish success on behalf of white Europeans. That’s not my style, not my schtick, though I know that is exactly what I will be accused of. I just don’t like chutzpah, that’s all. Some of the far right say, in effect, “The Jews have apartheid, so why shouldn’t we?“. I say “We don’t have apartheid, so why should the Jews?“. The conclusion is the opposite, but the positions have in common the call for consistency. When critics amalgamate my arguments with those of the far right, they are saying, in effect “how dare you call for consistency?“! As if logic is inherently racist. The lack of consistency with regard to Jewish racism is why the American left is ineffective on the Israel question, when it was effective in campaigning for a boycott of South Africa.
So what does my review of Wise’s book have to offer to African-Americans? Not much, really. Sorry about that. If black people can get out of the trap of self-pity created by people like Wise, so much the better. But I know what I am saying to the white majority: the ethnic interests of white Europeans lead to opposing Zionism. Since I oppose Zionism for moral reasons, and happen to be white, why should I even try to resist this heady cocktail of self-interest and self-righteousness? Isn’t it funny how the one thing which happens to be both good and in your interests is the hardest thing to do?
On page 148, he asks why privileged white people would want to join ‘the struggle’. This is a difficult question, and he tackles it boldly. How can he appeal to people he doesn’t like to abandon their interests? He uses a tried and tested technique, transforming the concept of ‘privilege’ into its opposite with convoluted mumbo jumbo about alienation and so on which reads like ‘Freud and Marx for dummies’. White people are ‘damaged’ by their own success. This is nonsense – either something benefits you or it doesn’t. On the other hand, persuading America’s white majority to cut off support for Israeli war crimes should be easy – these crimes are a. wrong, and b. against our interests. Surely Wise would do more by campaigning like this? He would achieve more for Palestinians than he can for the inhabitants of Darfur, but in doing so, he would undermine his own ethnic interests. I said Freud and Marx FOR dummies – that doesn’t mean believes, in relation to Jews, the pseudo-scientific psychobabble he preaches to white people.
People benefit from racial discrimination. That’s why they do it. There is no ‘structure’ of ‘racism’ – there is ethnic interest, which persuades people to discriminate. Ethnic conflict happens, just as there is class struggle and the war of the sexes. Races exist, and their interests conflict. True, their boundaries are vague, but so are families, and nobody expects people to stop defending their relatives. This may sound pessimistic, but avoiding conflict requires honesty.
What is Racism?
In contrast, Wise claims “Racism… allows you to think things and feel things that make you less than you were meant to be” on page 159 of his treatise. How does he know what we were ‘meant to be’? He assumes “racism” is something imposed on us from the outside. We are “conditioned” to be “alienated”, and this is bad. This approach is unscientific. How do you know what you ‘really’ are? Why is only white racism bad? Wise should answer these questions, but he won’t, so I’ve done it for him.
It is true that elites in the South conned whites into fighting and dying for a cause not theirs, as Wise points out on page 150. But this is equally true of elites in the North. Wise only brings in the concept of class interest when it enables him to attack white identity. If southern whites could have been persuaded to desert by calling for class solidarity, then northern whites could have been persuaded to desert by appealing to their ethnic identity. Racism can lead to war. But so can anti-racism.
He also worked for “the anti sweatshop movement, the justice for Darfur movement, and the anti-war movement” (page 145). And one more: the Palestine Solidarity Movement. I’m kidding – it was the ‘Stop David Duke’ campaign. Duke is an advocate for white rights, to put it mildly. I don’t think I would like him. I don’t expect Wise to like him either. But he doesn’t have to lie about him. Duke wouldn’t call Wise a Zionist. Why does Wise call Duke a Nazi? Because, in this culture of white guilt, he can get away with it. He claims that Duke’s problem was that he didn’t like black people. But that is not true. He is braver than that – he is a critic of Jewish privilege. But not a Nazi. The left will say I’m defending him. In fact, I’m defending the truth. Whatever I think of Duke and co., I will not lie about them.
Wise tries to deconstruct crime statistics in an anti-racist way. Sure, there are more homicides by black men, but more white serial killers, he says. It’s all about control, apparently. What about interracial rape? Of course, he doesn’t go there. But you have to be consistent. If you are going on about the relationship between ethnicity and horrible crimes to prove your hypothesis, you have to try to find counter-evidence. Science is not there to give us a warm fuzzy feeling, to quote James Watson, the greatest living biologist, fired as a result of the mob mentality stirred up by activists like Wise.
He mentions the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan several times. He claims that “white privilege” is what is causing ‘our’ soldiers to die. There are other explanations. The oil industry, for example. What did you think I was going to say?
Wise finally gets round to defining ‘racism’, the concept on which his thesis depends, on page 169. Racism is a “socially constructed power imbalance at the institutional level, which then tends to foster individual-level biases and racism“.
Let’s charitably ignore the circularity of this definition, and say it’s just plain wrong. Whiteness is not a social construct. It is easy to demonstrate, using Hamilton’s rule for calculating the circumstances under which it benefits a gene to promote altruism, that ethnic identity is adaptive. Far from being socially generated, then ‘fostering’ its individual expression, it’s just the reverse. Individual expression of ethnic identity, a result of genes following the laws of mathematics, constructs its social manifestation. Which is not to say its a good thing. Heterosexuality is even more adaptive, but one doesn’t have to ‘privilege’ it. One needn’t discriminate against homosexuality because it is maladaptive. But neither should you discriminate against heterosexuality. Or ethnic identity. And you certainly should not discriminate against the ethnic identity of one group in particular by calling it ‘racism’ and promoting violence and state repression against those who feel this genetic urge strongly, and happen to have white skin.
To conclude: “ethnic identity is adaptive according to Hamilton’s rule“. These eight words summarize my thinking on the question of race.
I still do agree with Atzmon’s rejection of what Blumenthal said in this video
Blumenthal, and, apparently, “a Who’s Who of Palestine solidarity activists” called Atzmon an ‘antisemite’, and distorted his analysis of Israel.
That was then. This is now.
Since October 2023, Max Blumenthal has been one of Israel’s fiercest opponents. He was the first to demolish the rape hoax https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report, found a report on the racist Tel Aviv fans’ riot in Amsterdam in November 2024,
and contributes almost daily to the growing movement for the dismantling of the Jewish state. Whereas Atzmon has had little to say.
1. Why the best explanation of Western support for Israel is ‘Jewish power,’ not ‘Imperialism’
I started with Mearsheimer & Walt’s 2007 The Israel Lobby. I used their argument in a critique of Chomsy’s Fateful Triangle, which was published online in 2010, first on Palestine Think Tank, then on Dissident Voice, and finally, The Jay Report: https://thejayreport.com/2020/05/17/an-article-of-mine-from-2010/. Mearsheimer & Walt are more moderate than I am – they don’t talk about ‘Jewish power.’
But the three of us agree that the main reason the USA backs Israel, is the power of the Israel Lobby. Since all the Western countries, bar Israel, are submissive to the USA, I only discuss the American branch of the Lobby.
Why do I defend the ‘Jewish power’ explanation? Because it is less complex, and requires fewer assumptions, than the alternative. To summarize:
American politicians fall over each other to propose laws giving special rights to Jews. The university sector is under assault, driven by the claim that Jews don’t feel safe on campus, following peaceful protests against genocide. Several people have been arrested, and some threatened with deportation, for allegedly saying they support Hamas.
No evidence has been produced showing that any of the accused have said anything in favour of Hamas, and
it is legal to say “up with Hamas.”
In May 2025, Congress briefly considered a bill which would make it a criminal offence, punishable by up to twenty years imprisonment, to advocate a boycott of Israeli products. The less draconian, but still unconstitutional, Antisemitism Awareness Act, has a better chance of becoming law.
These examples of politicians’ behaviour are clear attempts to violate the First Amendment to the Constitution. Legislators know this, yet they continue to attempt to make an exception; to ban speech which might undermine Jewish interests.
Is the above
an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel, or
is the most economical/parsimonious/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps American interests?
I can’t prove that this grovelling is genuine; one could believe that it’s fake. I can only argue that the more parsimonious explanation is that it is what it appears — the USA’s relationship to Israel is dictated by Jewish interests.
The right mostly claims Israel is an ally; the left tends to argue it is in the interests of US imperialism to throw money at the Jewish state. The right-wing and left-wing arguments prop each other up.
Consider the vacuity of the responses from left or right to the question of what Israel actually does for the empire it allegedly serves. They are reduced to waffling about oil, hegemony, democracy… but Israel is not a ‘forward base.’ It does not contribute troops to US adventures. It does not protect oilfields. Caitlin Johnstone, who defends the view that Israel serves the USA, points out that Israel attacks countries in the USA’s crosshairs. What she doesn’t see is that this ‘evidence’ is equally compatible with
Israel attacks countries the USA considers enemies, on behalf of the USA, or
the countries Israel attacks are considered enemies by the USA, because the USA supports Israel.
To find out whether the dog wags the tail, or vice-versa, we need to look at the internals of US politics. Other allies really are allies; they actually serve US interests. Israel needs a powerful, well-funded lobby to bribe, cajole, blackmail and threaten anyone who makes even accurate, mild criticisms – “it’s the Benjamins” – because it is not really an ally.
2. Avoidance of the ‘Jewish power’ hypothesis
I have defended the ‘Jewish power’ hypothesis to left-wing critics of Zionism many times. But they never try to answer it – they just continue assuming that Israel is acting for US imperialism.
‘It is important to stress the primary role of imperialism in this analysis, which means rejecting explanations that emphasize the supposed power of a “Zionist lobby,” or, worse, a “Jewish lobby.”’ – International Socialism 181, 2024, page 45.
I suspect the reason for leftists’ inability to respond rationally is that their real motive is emotional. They have internalised the idea that talk of ‘Jewish power’ and a ‘Jewish lobby’ is ‘antisemitic.’ This signals to Jewish supremacists that they take the allegation seriously.
The Gaza genocide is the greatest crime committed by a Western country since world war two. The most notorious American crime in Vietnam was at My Lai. Since 7/10/2023, there has been a My Lai every day in Palestine. The sadism with which Jews celebrate the deaths and injuries they are causing exceeds that of the Nazis. Jewish racism is in a league of its own.
It might be objected that the rulers of the Western countries support Israel to the hilt, and are therefore just as culpable. True – but there is a big difference between being a member of the racial group with power, and one of its poodles. Gentile supporters of Israel are like Chief Buthelezi, the Zulu politician who served the white apartheid regime. This means one might be able to help undermine support for Israel by persuading goyim that it is not in their ethnic interests, and that they are being used. It is difficult for the anti-imperialist left to argue like that.
3. The eternal victim narrative
I know that not all Jews are racial supremacists. I just encountered a number of anti-Zionist Jews at the first Jewish Anti-Zionist conference in Vienna, in June 2025: https://www.juedisch-antizionistisch.at/en.
Reuven Abergel, founder of Israel’s Black Panthers, narrated a variant of the eternal victim story. He is a Moroccan Arab Jew who migrated to Israel in the fifties. His main schtick was to point out how the Arab Jews (Mizrahi) provided cheap labour for Israel, and suffered from racial discrimination. He said the European Jews (Ashkenazi) drove a wedge between the Mizrahi and Palestinian communities – “they sent us to the same villages where Palestinians had been expelled.” The Ashkenazi did this because they suffered from a “disease” which they got from living in Europe.
Another contributor argued that, because Arabic is the first language of the Mizrahi, and because they’d lived happily in Arab lands until Western colonialism spoiled everything, the real oppression is Arabs being oppressed by Europeans. This ignores the fact that, as soon as you are born, you are either a Jew or a goy, in the eyes of the Israeli government. You might be Tunisian, but if you are also Jewish, you have the privilege of automatic citizenship of a Western economy, backed to the hilt by all the other Western countries. And, for whatever reason, those people who classify themselves as ‘Jewish’ tend to have a strong sense of ethnic identity.
Abergel added that, after the 1967 war, the Arab Jews became as racist as the rest. Another speaker, a woman from an Jewish-Egyptian family, said the Mizrahi are the most vicious Zionists.
At the other extreme, some anti-Zionist analysts appeal to Jews to stop supporting Zionism because it is harmful to Jews:
I wrote that Jonathan K Cook tried to persuade influential Jews to “stand foursquare against Israel.” I have a screenshot, but he appears to have deleted the tweet, so I won’t post it.
For the most part, Jews aren’t listening to these sincere, but naive, anti-Zionist voices. The genocide in Palestine is not antisemitic, but philosemitic – it’s in Jewish interests. By exterminating the untermenschen, they get more lebensraum.
It is not necessarily true that, if you give a racial group special rights, it will take advantage. Since the end of world war two, Europeans have voluntarily relinquished all their ethnic advantages. But the same period saw the rise of Jewish privilege; while white apartheid states were abandoned, the Jewish equivalent was backed to the hilt.
The fear of stating the obvious – the existence of Jewish power – is a consequence of Jewish power. We need to lose that fear.
Stephen Lawrence was a black London teenager. He was murdered in 1993 by a gang of white criminals, shouting racial insults. It took twenty years for the legal system to convict his murderers.
The law’s delay led to the widespread belief that it was because of “institutional racism”. In contrast, this brave investigation, “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics”, questions the consensus view, and argues that the initial failure to prosecute was simply the result of lack of evidence: http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs05.pdf (PDF).
Lawrence’s murder led the government to set up the Macpherson enquiry, which defined a racial incident as “any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person“. This gives complete freedom to anyone to define anyone else as a racist: http://spiked-online.com/newsite/article/13127.
The Mcpherson report used the familiar circular reasoning of Zionists and the p.c. left: “To question whether the murder of Stephen Lawrence was a purely racist crime was, in itself, adduced as evidence of racism.” – Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics, page xix.
This is the same logic used to attempt to censor any discusssion of the Holocaust, or less extreme examples of violence against minorities. It’s the same logic that made it hard to question whether Tawana Brawley, Crystal Magnum, and various other minority pseudo-victims were telling the truth. It’s the logic that led to the prosecution of George Zimmerman. It’s the false idea that white societies like Britain and America are uniquely prone to racial supremacy, and have to spend the rest of eternity apologizing for it. It leads to the idea that the plaintiff, not the defendant, should be given the benefit of the doubt when the plaintiff is black. This would mean abandoning one of the basic principles of Anglo-Saxon law.
Censorship, Fake Hate Crimes, and the Israel Lobby
A 2008 pamphlet arguing that support for the genocidal ideology of Zionism is related to the Allied narrative of WWII
Originally, this was a printed pamphlet, and a series of pages on the website pacificaforum.org. Herein, I’ve recreated it as one article.
Anti-fascists celebrate the bombing of Dresden
To Preman, who first pointed me in the right direction
No copyright – this pamphlet may be reproduced in full by anyone
What is Anti-Fascism?
The phrase ‘anti-fascism’ suggests opposition to fascism. If that were all there was to it, it wouldn’t be worth writing about. Almost everyone who has heard of fascism is opposed to it. It is known as one of the main causes of World War II and the concentration camps in which millions died.
But anti-fascism has always meant more than simply opposition to fascism.
Before World War II, anti-fascism was the slogan which recruited people across Europe and America to travel to Spain to oppose General Franco’s coup against the left-wing government. It was clear even at the time to a small group of ultra-leftists in France and Italy that it was a mistake to volunteer for this apparently noble cause. Their critique sounds kind of retro today, but with the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious that they were right. Today, we can see that those who volunteered for the ‘International Brigades’ under a coalition of anarchist and communist leaders fought and died for a cause that was not only doomed, but worse than useless, even if it had succeeded.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls are great novels about the Spanish Civil War. They are also accurate accounts of how the Communist Party, controlled by the Soviet Union, used the volunteers as cannon-fodder, then murdered its political rivals within the left-wing coalition or abandoned them to the right-wing forces they were fighting.
So Franco won, massacred his opponents, and established a military dictatorship which kept Spain in the middle ages for forty years. What is uncontested is that he refused to enter Spain into World War II on the side of Hitler, who respected Spain’s neutrality. Had the left won the Spanish Civil War, the government would have been a puppet of Moscow. Spain would probably have been forced to enter the war on the side of the Allies, and many more Spaniards would have died.
The extent to which people were inspired by anti-fascism during World War II can be exaggerated. For example, most of the Russian soldiers fighting the Germans at Stalingrad weren’t motivated by left-wing propaganda; they were marched to the front at gunpoint. But after the war, anti-fascism was found to be useful to the victors, and given a new lease of life. During the Nuremberg trials of the Nazi leaders, if any crime could be attributed to the Allies, the USA and the Soviet Union, as well as to the Axis powers, the charge was dropped. Thus air force commander Göring was not tried for bombing cities, nor admiral Dönitz for sinking civilian ships, since the Allies committed both these war crimes too. Göring was sentenced to death for his minor role in the Holocaust, though his bombing campaigns were by far his greatest crimes.
Each country had its specific contribution to make to the war effort – the Americans had their atom bombs, the Russians liked their rape, and the Germans’ specialty was genocide. In practice, the German Holocaust was little different from what the Allies were doing at the same time: the German government murdered many innocent civilians from Germany and neighboring countries using poison gas and other methods, and the Allies did the same thing using bombs. But British schoolchildren are taken on trips to see the ruins of Belsen, but not Dresden. This one-sided interpretation of history is enforced by law in Germany and Austria. Anti-fascism has become a central pillar of the official version of history under whose influence we have all been raised. When an Australian historian was arrested in London recently for holocaust denial, it was not for denying the genocide of the Tasmanian aborigines.
Why anti-fascism, rather than anti-communism or anti-democracy? No-one actually argues that bombing people is less barbaric than gassing them, yet that is what, implicitly, we are being told when we are taught to hate Hitler but to respect Roosevelt. This is anti-fascism – not just opposition to one set of war criminals, but support for the other set. Anti-fascists cannot claim to be opposed to both sides – why would they call themselves ‘anti-fascists’ if they do not believe fascism is worse than other forms of civilization, if they do not believe that gassing Jews is worse than burning Germans to death? This immediately raises the worst aspect of anti-fascism. The phrase we have all learned, ‘The Holocaust’, means the attempted genocide of the Jews, excluding other holocausts, excluding other categories whom the Nazis attempted to wipe out, and excluding the equally monstrous crimes of the Allies. Anti-fascism discriminates in favor of Jews.
This hypocritical, self-righteous, discriminatory, racist perspective also supports vigilance (and often violence) against individuals and small groups of alleged fascists in the world today. It means exaggerating their importance, and blaming them for ‘hate crimes’, many of which turn out to be fake. We are urged to be on guard against the non-existent threat of the emergence of a major racist movement. When a lone lunatic commits a crime against a minority person, the media make out its a movement. And the reason the media exaggerate the threat of hate crimes is because it sells, and it sells because we believe – we, with our selective moral attitudes, keep anti-fascism alive:
The US media ran a series of stories about ‘black churches’ being burned down by racists. It turned out that kids were setting fire to churches at random, indifferent to the buildings’ ethnicity.
French Jews faked an anti-semitic attack by Muslims on the Metro – the media devoted a lot more space to the alleged attack than to the subsequent police announcement that it was made up
A black woman in Oregon put a burning cross in her own front yard to try to claim she was a victim of racists
Jews in London invented cases of racial harassment
A black man was injured in a fight in an Oregon town. He told police nothing racist was said – it just happened that the other participants were white. Despite this clarification, local anti-fascists continue to use it as an example of a ‘hate crime’ in their efforts to suppress freedom of speech.
A black teenager in New York claimed she suffered a horrific assault by a group of white men including the assistant district attorney. After an emotional campaign on her behalf by black politicians, she was found to have invented the incident in its entirety.
A Jewish couple in Oregon set fire to their own apartment and scratched swastikas on their car and claimed it was a hate crime
Another black woman, in North Carolina, claimed to have been raped by several white students from an Ivy League university. Despite obvious inconsistencies in her story, the police proceeded. The students were subjected to trial by media, but in the end, she was proven to be lying.
I could go on. In fact, I will. Where hate crimes are not simply invented, they are often exaggerated. A California woman was convicted of the capital crime of murder because her dog went berserk and killed another woman. The woman was criminally irresponsible in allowing a large dangerous dog to roam free, but there was not a shred of evidence she had deliberately set the dog on the victim. The reason the jury came to such an unjustified verdict was the campaign in the media to make the accident a ‘hate crime’ – the victim was a lesbian, and the dog-owner’s husband is a lawyer, some of whose clients belong to a prison gang called the Aryan Brotherhood. The murder conviction was overturned on appeal. A well-publicized case in Portland, Oregon, in 1988, where an Ethiopian man, Mulugeta Seraw, was killed, a skinhead was found guilty of premeditated murder, and a racist group, White Aryan Resistance, was sued by the Southern Poverty Law Center for allegedly contributing to his death, illustrates the dangers of exaggerating the organized racist threat. A more detailed account can be found at the end of this booklet, but to summarize:
Seraw was killed in an unplanned street brawl, not a premeditated lynching
It was manslaughter, not murder
The racist group did not contribute to his death
An even graver example of what can happen when anti-fascism affects the legal system is the death of Vicki Weaver, who, with her husband and children, were besieged in a remote Idaho cabin in 1992, where clearly they were not doing anyone any harm. The FBI shot her dead while she held her baby in her arms because of the racist views of her husband. Some anti-fascists say they do not support state-organized anti-fascism. They believe ‘the community’ should confront ‘the racists’, not rely on the police to do it. They criticize the police for not going far enough. It is not clear what they would have done to the Weaver family.
But the major consequence of anti-fascism today is even more serious: it helps the state of Israel ensure the continuation of uncritical support in Western countries for its ongoing program of ethnic cleansing. Anti-fascism, by making the murder of Jews by the Germans more of a crime than the murder of Germans by the Allies, effectively implies pro-Jewish racism. Zionism is the implementation of that particular form of racism. Anti-fascism is used to suppress speech which could undermine support for Israel in the West.
A peace activist shot trying to save children from Israeli bullets
The clearest example is Germany. It is difficult to overestimate how deeply Zionism is rooted in this country, whose politicians are trying to persuade the European Union to adopt a law making it illegal to deny Israel’s right to exist – the primary victims of this law will be Muslims. This angst permeates German society, especially the left:
‘The basic opinions of the Anti-Germans include support of the state of Israel and – although this is only true for some – American foreign policy such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a critique of mainstream left anti-capitalist views, which are thought to be simplistic and structurally anti-Semitic, and a critique of anti-Semitism, which is considered to be deeply rooted in German cultural history’ (Wikipedia)
As a result, opposition to Zionism in Germany, one of Israel’s main supporters, is difficult, radical websites and journals have suppressed articles about Israeli war crimes and protests against them, and some Germans even commemorate the bombing of Dresden and other Allied war crimes. Why do Western countries make such efforts to prosecute Serbs for ethnically cleansing Muslims, but support Jews doing exactly the same thing? If Turkey joins the European Union, it will contain some countries in which it is illegal to deny the genocide of the Jews, and another where it is illegal to assert that the genocide of the Armenians happened!
All these aspects of anti-fascism – a lack of skepticism about alleged hate crimes, overestimating the threat of right-wing violence, a one-sided view of World War II, the belief that crimes against Jews are worse than crimes against other people, the belief that crimes committed by Jews are not as bad as crimes committed by other people, and the censorship of speech which could offend Israel’s supporters – reinforce each other.
A Note on the Title The title of this booklet is taken from Wilhelm Reich’s book The Mass Psychology of Fascism, a product of anti-fascism in the thirties, but the content bears no resemblance, so anyone reading this pamphlet thinking they are getting a treatise on psychology will be disappointed. But having got this far, they have probably already paid for it. However, the title is semi-serious, because there is a psychological aspect to the way anti-fascism undermines a rational analysis of how Western societies work. In particular, the social pressure not to question the burden of supporting Israel is enormous, at all levels of society. How can the Anti-Defamation League, which seeks to undermine the First Amendment, the foundation of academic freedom, persuade academics to apologize for teaching students about Israel’s crimes? Why would theaters suppress a play about a US citizen murdered by the Israeli armed forces, in order to avoid hurting Jewish feelings? Why do US presidents grovel before the leaders of a far smaller country dependent on the generosity of US taxpayers? The irrational in politics is never so clear as when discussing the power of the Israel Lobby.
Oil, War and the Lobby
Only a few years ago, because of the power of the Israel Lobby, it was almost impossible to acknowledge the power of the Israel Lobby. At the top end of American society, several politicians have had their careers terminated after mildly criticizing US Israel policy. At the other end, I remember arguing that the Israel Lobby was the main cause of the invasion of Iraq at an activist meeting.
The responses to my arguments were
that’s ridiculous
you’re mad
you’re a Nazi
Since the failure of the Iraq war, it has become easier to argue that US foreign policy in the Middle East is generally subservient to the interests of a foreign power, Israel. The turning point was the widely positive reception Mearsheimer and Walt’s The Israel Lobby received when it was published in 2007, in spite of a virtual media blackout. Before explaining how Israel has become the most important consideration for US policies in the Middle East, they show how these policies cannot be explained by the phrase ‘war for oil’. This is my explanation:
Before the attack on Iraq in 2003, those who claimed it was a war for oil, which includes both supporters and opponents of war, said that conquering Iraq’s oilfields would reduce the price of oil, by increasing the supply, benefiting the economy. Following the invasion, the price of oil rose considerably, and the oil industry made record profits. The ‘war for oil’ chorus then claimed what they meant was it was a war for the oil industry. Both president Bush and vice-president Cheney used to work in that industry, you see. Say no more.
More recently, the oil industry raised the price of oil dramatically after an unusually aggressive speech against Iran by an Israeli cabinet member. This had the effect of warning the world of the disastrous economic consequences of a military attack on Iran. Price-fixing by the oil industry is illegal, so I do not for a moment suggest it was a deliberate warning.
In the Iran-Iraq war from 1980 to 1988, the USA supported Iraq with varying degrees of enthusiasm
The Iraqi attack on Kuwait in 1991 started as a dispute over an oilfield, but Saddam Hussein’s concern over working class unrest internally was a more important reason for the war. The US government told Iraq it would remain neutral, but after the invasion, led an international force to drive Iraq out of Kuwait. If the USA had supported Iraq instead of Kuwait, it would also have been called a war for oil, with equal justification.
Five years after the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, some western companies are signing contracts to pump Iraqi oil and gas. For some, this is overwhelming evidence that it was a war for oil.
Paul Wolfowitz, one of the architects of the Iraq war, said it was a war for oil both before and after the invasion. Those who triumphantly cite these claims as evidence that the war was all about oil forget two things: the man is a rabid Zionist, and a congenital liar. Only about fifteen percent of US domestic oil consumption comes from the Middle East. If civilian oil was the primary determinant of US policy in the Middle East, it would have similar policies toward the oil-producing countries in the region. In fact, its policies toward the three leading Middle East oil producers are as diverse as can be: hostility to Iran, war against Iraq, and friendliness to Saudi Arabia.
The military importance of oil is a different matter. Realizing that penetrating this aspect of the ‘war for oil’ hypothesis is beyond my own modest abilities, I humbly approached the work of the esteemed Noam Chomsky. Of all the insights which this towering intellect has contributed to the community, surely none compares to his finding that military forces use lots of oil. Not satisfied with this feat of scholarship, Chomsky goes further, to note that the military consider it a good idea to grab oil for yourself whilst denying it to your enemy. So far, so good. The only difficulty is when he tries to test his theory’s predictions against actual US behavior. He claims that the USA invaded Iraq in 2003 in order to ‘control’ its oil, and that of nearby countries, for military purposes. What he somehow fails to explain is how few oil producing countries the USA has even attacked, let alone controlled, over the last century, for most of which it has been the world’s greatest power. The USA turned down an easy opportunity to occupy Iraq after winning the 1991 war. Did it really take the Pentagon until 2003 to work out that it uses a lot of oil?
To summarize, the ‘war for oil’ theory predicts that, in a conflict in an oil-producing region, the USA will support one side or the other, may occupy one of them, oil companies will invest in the region, and the result will be a rise, or a fall, in the price of oil. I won’t insult the reader’s intelligence by explaining why this invalidates the theory.
What about the ‘Israel Lobby’ theory?
The most advanced version of this theory is Mearsheimer and Walt’s. It says that the Lobby is the most powerful influence on US Middle East policy, but that the USA is capable of reducing or eliminating that influence. This theory predicts that, where the USA’s interests conflict with Israel’s, the former will usually support the latter, but that, in some cases, the USA, or parts of it, will act in its own interests.
The predictions of this theory are confirmed by reality:
a) The USA sometimes tries to restrain Israel, but is then forced to backtrack. More often, it supports Israel to the hilt, even when Israel’s actions damage America’s plans. Mearsheimer and Walt remind us that, shortly after September 11th 2001, president Bush tried to persuade Israel to call a halt to settlements in the West Bank and make various other concessions to the Palestinians, as a way of helping reduce support for Islamic extremism. Uncooperative and ungrateful as ever for the vast resources America gives it in return for nothing, Israel rudely rebuffed the world’s supposedly most powerful man, refused to meet his envoy, and forced him to drop his requests for restraint. A humbled Bush invited Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to the White House, and called him a ‘man of peace’. Translation: sorry for the interruption, keep on killing, we won’t interfere again.
b) But, as the theory predicts, there are exceptions. The most outstanding is America’s cuddly relationship with Saudi Arabia, a country with a dim view of Israel. Though the US does not give to the Saudis vast quantities of the most modern weaponry, as it does to the Israelis, it does sell them warplanes and co-operate with them in numerous other ways, to the chagrin of Zionists, liberals and Osama bin Laden.
Chomsky doesn’t like the Israel Lobby theory. He assumes that Israeli and US interests coincide. His blind spot derives from treating the US political system as, well, a system. Picture a visitor from another planet looking at a car traveling slowly, making a loud noise, and emitting a lot of black smoke. The alien, using his x-ray vision, analyzes the car’s engine, carburetor and spark plugs, and describes how the vehicle is perfectly designed to travel slowly, make a loud noise, and emit a lot of black smoke. This analogy illustrates the logical fallacy called functionalism – you cannot say if a system is functioning correctly unless you know what it is designed for. For Marxists, the system is the executive committee of the ruling class – it serves capitalism. For liberals like Mearsheimer and Walt, it is supposed to serve ‘the people’. Chomsky does on occasion admit to the influence of the Israel Lobby in the USA, but his theory only allows him to see it as part of the system – he says the Lobby makes the system act in its own interests – by supporting Israel. He notes that the USA often approves Israeli actions in advance – and concludes that shows that Israel obeys the USA. Mearsheimer, Walt and I have proven him wrong – on numerous occasions, when Israel has acted, US politicians, including presidents, have made mild criticisms, the US Israel Lobby has mobilized, and the US politicians have apologized. Unless you believe that this is an elaborate charade to cover the fact that Israel obeys the USA, you find the Israel Lobby is like the engine of a car traveling slowly, making a loud noise, and a lot of black smoke.
On the website Counterpunch and elsewhere, Michael Neumann, Jeffrey Blankfort and others have run rings around the party line defended by Chomsky and similar hacks, that Middle East policy is primarily about oil, elites and hegemony. The complacent platitudes of Chomsky and his disciples are not merely mistakes, nor merely products of dishonesty – there is an element of consciously avoiding a challenge to the power of the Lobby because of cowardice – they refuse to debate the question. Leaving these faint-hearts behind, we – the vanguard – defend the view that, thanks to its Lobby, the greatest influence on US policy in the Middle East is that of Israel, a foreign country with completely different interests, at the expense of good relations with nations and movements with similar interests, and lots of oil.
Whether you believe the US political system is designed to serve the interests of the capitalist elite or the interests of the huddled masses, no honest observer can avoid the conclusion that the Israel Lobby is dysfunctional for that system: the tail wags the dog. The dogma that Israel is a strategic asset of the USA is a dangerous error, because it makes opposing uncritical support for Zionism sound more difficult than it actually is. Some of Chomsky’s followers go so far as to claim that Israel is a victim of US policies in the Middle East – by ‘goading’ it to drop cluster-bombs on Lebanese schoolchildren, the USA forces Israel to stir up hatred against itself, taking the heat off the USA. I’m not making this up.
None of this means the war in Iraq has really benefited Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt argue that the US Israel Lobby is not a perfect cipher for Israeli interests: the Lobby was the prime mover of the Iraq disaster. If Iraq is a little confusing, the case of Iran is clear as glass: US and Israeli interests are completely different. The USA can choose whether to be on good or bad terms with the Islamic Republic, basing its choice on calculated self-interest, whereas Israel faces the problem that Muslims cannot, on principle, recognize a Jewish state on their land. When vice-president Dick Cheney was a businessman, he opposed sanctions against Iran, on the grounds that they are bad for business. When he became a politician, dependent on the democratic system, he had to support sanctions and warmongering. When George Bush Senior was standing for re-election, he had to apologize to the Lobby after he mentioned its influence and was accused of anti-semitism. Jimmy Carter, subjected to the same outrageous slander, did not have to apologize, since he is not seeking office. Bush Junior was able to defy the Israeli war drive against Iran during 2008 for the same reason.
Giving the lie to Chomsky’s ‘analysis’, big corporations and some of the undemocratic parts of the state, such as the intelligence services, are currently more likely to resist the war drive than the elected bits, which are most subject to the pressure of the Israel Lobby. It was the combined weight of all sixteen American intelligence services which leashed the dogs of war at the end of 2007 with a devastating report which said that Iran has no nuclear weapons program. The Lobby was furious – the centerpiece of its war drive, after the exposure of its lies about Iraq, was a stream of fabrications about the Iranian menace – but there wasn’t much it could do until the election season came around the following year, when it made the candidates for president appear at its conference and compete with each other to make fawning speeches in support of Israel.
The question has become not if Israel is the primary influence on US policy in the Middle East, but how. We have a partial answer in the Mearsheimer and Walt bestseller – it’s the Lobby’s mastery of the electoral process. But this wouldn’t work if the allegation of ‘anti-semitism’ directed at any legislator who makes a mild criticism of Israel and its Lobby were ignored, as they would be if the democratic system was simply a tool of the ruling class. It’s the irrational deference to Israel which needs explaining. This pamphlet is intended to be a modest step forward – by mixing the critique of anti-fascism developed in the thirties with anti-Zionist theory and a bit of half-serious psychology, I hope to stimulate readers to think critically about this difficult question.
The inability of today’s activists to challenge the Israel Lobby goes some way toward explaining the absence of an anti-war movement today. In the seventies, the American ‘movement’ was the envy of the world, as it helped end the Vietnam war. Did the rise of sensitivity, the notion that how someone feels about an issue is as valid as a scientific fact, make this movement more, or less, effective? The Lobby is not only a key issue in opposing war today, it is also the most effective litmus test separating those who want to change the world from those who want to feel good about themselves.
Many of those who follow anti-fascism would deny they are allies of the Israel Lobby. They believe they are just as much opposed to the oppression of Palestinians by Jews as they are opposed to white supremacy in Western countries. But, just as it was not possible to fight against Franco in Spain in the 1930’s ‘autonomously’ of the communist party, so today one cannot consistently single out fascism as a unique evil without simultaneously abetting the influence of Zionism. This consequence is quite logical: anti-fascism promotes the idea that murdering Jews is worse than murdering German or Japanese people. This is pro-Jewish racism. Support for the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians follows as night follows day.
Liberal anti-fascists don’t realize this, but Zionists certainly do. Roughly speaking, anti-fascists can be categorized as follows, in increasing order of their grasp of logic:
Radical anti-fascists, mostly anarchist
Liberal goody-goodies, with names like ‘The Coalition for Human Dignity’
Nationwide Zionist pressure groups such as the Anti-Defamation League
These different strands of anti-fascism have more in common than they admit –
they greatly exaggerate the danger from white extremists They support the moral panics which frequently appear in the media, alternative and corporate alike, claiming fascists are about to make an appearance. A few years ago, the good people of Portland were urged to gather in Gabriel Park, a wealthy part of town, to head off a rumored invasion by ‘Nazi skinheads’, who, it was claimed, would represent a danger to the Jewish population of the area. As if the police would allow teenagers, even those with unorthodox views on German history, to terrorize a well-heeled district. Claims of racist activity in poorer, blacker areas are more plausible, but here, too, anti-fascism exaggerates. When a shotgun was fired randomly at a house in North Portland, and some white kids were arrested for the offense, ‘Hate-Free Zone’ posters appeared, and the local TV, newspapers and alternative websites buzzed with excitement, as if one random, victimless shooting was another Kristallnacht, though there was no evidence of racist intent. Yet when a black youth shoots another dead, the silence is deafening. Another aspect of the inherent racism of anti-fascism is shown – ‘black-on-black’ violence is not important to anti-fascists. This bias mirrors the attitude of traditional racists that what ‘they’ do among themselves doesn’t matter to ‘us’. If Ethiopian Mulugeta Seraw had been killed by African-Americans, or if he were white, he would not have become a cause célèbre.
they are deliberately vague about what crimes these ‘Nazis’ are guilty of Anti-fascists write and talk about ‘Nazi activity’, consciously blurring the distinction between expressing an opinion and conspiring to commit criminal violence. Expressing the view that races are more important than they really are, and that some are more important than others, is not a crime, neither in law nor in reality. Those who want to ban racism on the grounds that it spreads ‘hate’ could easily go on to ban Marxist and similar ideas which promote class conflict. Moreover, it is wrong in principle to ban racist theory. A scientific approach to racism says it is unlikely that a racist theory is both valid and true. Anti-fascism cannot tolerate this ambiguity. James Watson, one of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, was fired for saying that some racist ideas might be true. Zionism should not be suppressed on the grounds that it is racist. Whether the USA will indefinitely tolerate agents of a foreign power actively undermining its constitution is another matter.
they tell lies about their opponents One of the techniques used by anti-fascists is to smear all their targets as ‘Nazis’. Any historian who doubts the official story of The Holocaust in all its gory detail, lampshades and all, is condemned as a Nazi sympathizer. In Britain, the ‘Anti-Nazi League’ claims that the British National Party is ‘Nazi’. This used to be almost a half-truth. The BNP’s predecessor, the National Front, was founded by outright National Socialists. There are photographs of these clowns wearing Nazi uniforms – in Britain in the nineteen-fifties! It took a long time to live that one down – but the BNP finally found an opportunity to break with its anti-semitic antecedents, in the war on terror. In 2006, following the Israeli attack on Lebanon, the BNP enthusiastically supported it, seeing it as part of the war against Muslims at home and abroad, and made a final purge of anti-Jewish attitudes amongst its membership. For the BNP, support for Israel went along with abandoning anti-semitism.
they attempt to police all opponents of anti-fascism, not just fascists Anti-fascists are in favor of suppressing debate. Their position ‘No Platform for Racists’ gives power to those who define what is racist, the product of negotiations between leftist hacks and Zionist lawyers. They don’t want you to read this pamphlet. It’s not that they disagree with what I say – they want to suppress it altogether, so you can neither agree nor disagree. The editors of the Indymedia left wing websites have deleted articles which they claimed were racist, but which clearly weren’t. It is easy to predict how anti-fascists will distort the argument in this pamphlet. They will claim I am saying ‘Zionists will accuse us of anti-semitism anyway, so we may as well be anti-semitic’. This is not the case.
Anti-fascists make great efforts to persuade us that they are not aiding ‘the state’ in general, seemingly unaware that their lies and distortions serve the interests of one state in particular. They encourage attacks on fascists, legal and otherwise, on the grounds that fascists spread violent ideas, but do nothing to oppose Zionists doing the same thing, on a bigger scale, and with more effect.
A poster produced by Zionists sadistically celebrating the death of Rachel Corrie, a peace activist killed by an Israeli bulldozer
When the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League decided to use the death of Mulugeta Seraw to attack freedom of speech, they chose to prosecute the White Aryan Resistance, not because this group was actually involved in Seraw’s death, not because they thought this prosecution would prevent further deaths, but because fascists are, to say the least, unpopular, so the public were more likely to tolerate this blatant attack on the First Amendment. Following this victory for anti-fascism, Zionists started a campaign to purge academia of critics of Israel. Some were fired, others forced to say they would stop spreading ‘hate’ in order to keep their jobs. Some even adopted Chomsky’s views. As a result of its decision to tackle the Israel/Palestine question, the University of Oregon’s Pacifica Forum is currently subject to a campaign by the SPLC and the local anti-fascists of the ‘Anti-Hate Task Force’ to smear it as anti-semitic and persuade the University to close it down, by linking it to a series of alleged ‘hate crimes’.
Anti-fascism, by its nature, is part of the fabric of emotional manipulation which gives Israel more funding from the USA than all other countries put together. This is what gives Israel its license to kill, and its ability to suppress freedom to criticize it. Opposition to this machinery of repression, hate and war cannot be combined with spreading the ideas which support it, or the emotions which support the ideas which support it.
Racially-motivated violence is not the major form of violence. Even at its height, skinhead violence was not the number one killer. Why not campaign against other social phenomena which cause violence, such as the illegality of drugs? The appeal of anti-fascism is not rational calculation of what is the greater social evil. Its appeal is that it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling – you can feel you are fighting against racism, one of the most pernicious aspects of this society, while in reality you are doing the exact opposite. Mountaineers know that a warm fuzzy feeling is the penultimate stage of hypothermia. They also know to hang on to their icepicks when navigating a slippery slope…
First We Take Manhattan
Defenders of Israel routinely try to disarm its critics by accusing them of anti-semitism. But most critics of Israel are simply opposed to the crimes of this state, not to the ethno-religious group to which many of its inhabitants belong. It is like saying that the movement against apartheid was motivated by prejudice against the Afrikaaners, the Dutch-speaking white South Africans who supported it. One of the main motives for opposing Israel or Israel’s behavior is opposition to racism, since it is as clear as day that one of the main characteristics of the state of Israel is its racism – it favors Jews over Palestinians, to put it mildly. But the US government has consistently opposed the characterization of Zionism as a form of racism on the international stage – the opposite of its behavior regarding racial segregation in South Africa. Yet, in contrast to Israel, the USA had an interest in supporting the South African apartheid regime, which fought Russia’s allies in Africa. This divergence cannot be explained by calling it ‘capitalism’ – why is the USA so supportive of Israeli capitalism, when it was so critical of apartheid capitalism? All the ‘materialist’ explanations of the West’s support for Israel amount to circular arguments, and should not be taken seriously: behind the absence of logic is a lack of valor.
The problem is emotional and psychological. Even when allegations of anti-semitism are ridiculous, we tend to take them seriously, because of the pro-Jewish racism which is embedded in our culture. As a result, pro-Palestinian activists make an effort to deny that they are anti-Jewish.
There are some important exceptions, who have consciously rejected being concerned about the danger of anti-semitism in the Palestinian solidarity movement. One example is Gilad Atzmon, an ex-soldier from Israel, and a major jazz musician. In a witty and provocative way, he says we tend to be more concerned about the false issue of anti-semitism than we are about the real issue of Jewish racism. Furthermore, he argues that it is impossible to be an anti-Zionist, non-religious Jew. He says there are three kinds of people in the world who identify themselves as Jewish –
Zionists
Religious Jews who oppose Zionism for theological reasons
Secular Jews who claim to be against Zionism but aren’t really
Not surprisingly, this hypothesis was unwelcome to groups like Jews Against Zionism, who denounce Atzmon around the Palestine solidarity movement as ‘a notorious anti-semite’. Frequent ‘demands’ are made that he be banned from this meeting or that website, because he criticizes Jewish identity as such, not just its most successful product, apartheid in Palestine. Just as the Israel Lobby proves its power by suppressing those who criticize its power, so Atzmon’s opponents show their chutzpah by censoring those who criticize their hypocrisy.
Another good example in support of Atzmon’s thesis about the vacuity of Jewish anti-Zionism is the case of Lenni Brenner, whose Zionism in the Age of the Dictators is available on a German website, marxists.de. Brenner shows how Zionists, far from being defenders of the Jewish people, collaborated with their worst enemies, the Nazis. Particularly gruesome is the example of Hungarian Zionists, led by Rezso Kasztner, arranging to have 600 Jews saved, to travel to Palestine, in return for abandoning 450,000 to their deaths. The Zionists were more concerned about creating a Jewish state than they were about saving Jewish lives. Brenner’s aim is to turn Jews against Zionism on the grounds that it sometimes goes against their interests. This won’t wash. In the first place, Zionists could answer, ‘yes, we did collaborate with the Nazis during World War II, but we have learned since then never to give an inch to our enemies (the Palestinians, the Iranians, the goyim)‘. But more importantly, Brenner’s argument amounts to saying ‘Don’t support the Zionist gang of ethnic cleansers, murderers and promoters of a nuclear holocaust – they collaborated with the enemies of the Jews!’. Which implies that, if these ethnic cleansers, murderers, and holocaust-mongers didn’t collaborate with Jews’ enemies, they wouldn’t be so bad. Brenner’s argument is tactical: Zionism was a bad tactic from the viewpoint of Jews. He tries to persuade Jews not to support apartheid because it doesn’t work. Brenner showed his true colors when he joined the ranks of those ‘demanding’ the suppression of Atzmon’s articles, to protect you and I from his treif thoughts.
In a similar sleight of hand, Noam Chomsky claims that the ‘apartheid wall’ which Israel constructed in the West Bank is designed to steal Palestinian land and water, not for Israel’s security, as the government claims. He employs the logical fallacy known as a ‘false dichotomy’ to do this – pretending that the wall is either for security or for robbing the Palestinians. In fact, it does both, but its primary purpose, in which it has been highly successful, is to defend Israelis against suicide bombers. Chomsky can’t admit it is for Israel’s security, and condemn it too. Some of his adherents criticize Israel’s policies of murder, torture and so on, on the grounds that they are bad for its security. In other words, if they were good for Israel’s security, they would support them.
Like Atzmon, Jeffrey Blankfort, one of America’s brave critics of Israel, argues that it is very difficult to have a Jewish identity separate from Zionism:
‘The distinction that we are always careful to make between being Jewish and being Zionist is essentially deceptive and that while all Jews are not Zionists, the organized Jewish communities throughout the world, despite whatever differences they may have, are totally behind the Zionist project.’
Do I agree? I don’t know – but I’m not going to allow fake anti-Zionists to prevent me from finding out by blackmailing me with fear of anti-semitism. It is this irrational fear which holds us back from effectively challenging Zionism.
URL of Duke
The following quotation typifies the apologetic attitude to Israel which I believe has been a major obstacle to the success of Palestinian solidarity:
‘Unfortunately, groups that assert Palestinian human rights and criticize Israel often attract and can be co-opted by people holding anti-Semitic and other racist viewpoints… That allows legitimate and necessary criticism of Israel’s policies to be dismissed as anti-Semitic by Israel apologists, denying Israel the corrective feedback that might save it from the worldwide disrespect it now suffers and the self-degrading and ultimately self-destructive path it has pursued from its beginnings…’
This is from a letter to an Oregon newspaper. You can find variants of it all over the place. It argues that the Palestinian solidarity movement needs to demonstrate its moral purity to the ethnic cleansers of Palestine. Israel’s supporters have already successfully labeled its critics as anti-semitic and rendered sympathy for the Palestinians completely ineffective throughout the Western world. How could the solidarity movement be less effective if it were less concerned about anti-semitism?
An academic in Britain was suspended from her union after posting a link to an article on a fascist website, which she found by googling the phrase ‘humanitarian disaster in Gaza’. She didn’t know it was run by fascists – she just read the one article, and it contained nothing offensive. Zionists and leftists in the union saw her link and went ballistic, and she apologized – but they didn’t reinstate her – an example of the futility of kowtowing to these people. A better approach would be to insist on her right to link to whomever she likes. Is it her fault if some opponents of Israeli influence are fascists? The union, the Universities and Colleges Union, was the first to call for a boycott of Israel, but it lacks the courage to stand firm against the predictable chorus of ‘anti-semitism’. The union gives Zionists the message that it will try hard to satisfy their complaints. Almost all of Palestinian solidarity waves the same white flag.
Suppose you found a coherent article by a fascist containing valid arguments about the Israel/Palestine issue? Are you worried that you will accept everything fascists say if you accept anything they say? Or are you really afraid of what people might think? I know I am – of course Zionists and their friends would distort what I am saying, would use my reference to a fascist article to try to claim that I am a fascist myself. But that is going to happen anyway. I have already been accused of anti-semitism by more than one ex-comrade. I don’t waste time trying to placate Zionists and their poodles.
Mearsheimer and Walt cringe when critics point out that their The Israel Lobby was well-received among fascists, but they should stand their ground. Instead of apologizing and backtracking, we should oppose the Zionists as provocatively as possible. It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it – we should make clear our contempt for Israel’s fifth column in the tone as well as in the content of our message.
A play about Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist killed by the Israeli army, was called off in several North American cities out of concern for the sensitivities of Jewish groups. For those who would like to see the play, there are two possible responses. One is to argue rationally:
‘Theaters gave in to Zionist pressure, not Jewish sensitivity – many Jews are deeply concerned about Israeli atrocities…’
The more effective approach is to become insensitive.
An admirable example of a step in the right direction is the response of the anti-war discussion group ‘Pacifica Forum’ at the University of Oregon to Zionist critics who labeled it anti-semitic in the local media. The Forum invited holocaust revisionists – historians who question aspects of the official holocaust narrative – to talk about the Israel Lobby and freedom of speech. As a result, the Southern Poverty Law Center has added the Pacifica Forum to its list of ‘hate groups’. When the SPLC, one of the Lobby’s poisonous snakes, crawled out of the swamps of Alabama and slithered in our direction, we felt shivers of both revulsion and excitement. How different from the situation at the same university four years earlier, when a professor was accused of anti-semitism, and ended up signing an agreement repeating the lies of anti-fascism, expressing
‘…his horror at the wave of anti-Semitic events around the world in recent years’
The Palestine Solidarity Campaign in Britain showed the same paralyzing deference to the feelings of sensitive Jewish princesses by wasting valuable time discussing whether to invite Gilad Atzmon to its conference, because it took the allegations of anti-semitism seriously. Indymedia deleted an article by me, because I argued that anti-semitism is no big deal, which they interpreted as promoting it. The editors of this site are so pro-semitic they interpret indifference as antipathy.
Palestinians too suffer from sensitivity. For example, Yasser `Arafat said
‘Zionism is an ideology that is imperialist, colonialist, racist; it is profoundly reactionary and discriminatory; it is united with antisemitism in its retrograde tenets and is, when all is said and done, another side of the same base coin’
How fair-minded this sounds in comparison to the lies Israel heaped on `Arafat’s head. How balanced and objective. How warm and fuzzy. And how wrong! One problem with this approach is its lack of proportion. Zionism and anti-semitism are not two sides of the same coin – Zionism is much worse than anti-semitism. Anti-semitism today doesn’t result in gas chambers, as it did sixty-five years ago, but Zionism is killing people right now, with bullets, bombs, starvation and disease, and suppressing our ability to stop it, with censorship and blackmail.
The idea that anti-semitism and Zionism are on the same side is only true in the sense that all violently opposed forces reinforce each other. Of course Zionism helps encourage anti-semitism, and benefits from it – but its main products are murder, dispossession and forcing children to grow up in a concentration camp, the Gaza strip, and in similar conditions in the West Bank and in refugee camps in neighboring countries. The fact that some of the children who survive this experience grow up with an attitude toward Jews is hardly the main problem. It is an inconvenient truth that for a section of the Western public, an increase in anti-semitism would lead to a decrease in support for Israel, so Zionism and anti-semitism are sometimes on opposite sides of the fence, rather than two sides of the same coin. It follows that it is impossible to be equally opposed to Zionism and to anti-semitism. To oppose the influence of Israel, to undermine support for ethnic cleansing and war in the Middle East, it is necessary to abandon anti-fascism and everything that goes with it.
First, They Came For The Fascists…
Mulugeta Seraw
An instructive example of a moral panic which united the police, the left and the media in an anti-fascist witch-hunt against hate crimes is the case of Mulugeta Seraw. In 1988, in Portland, Oregon, Seraw, an Ethiopian immigrant, was killed in a drunken dispute over a parking space. Four skinheads were convicted of murder, one of them, Kenneth Mieske, sentenced to thirty years in prison, and the organization White Aryan Resistance was successfully sued for $12.5 million by the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League. Elinor Langer’s book about the case, A Hundred Little Hitlers, is a rare example of authentic journalism – she even spells Blood and Honour correctly. More importantly, she goes beyond her own liberal attitudes, and discovers that:
Seraw was killed in an unplanned street brawl, not a premeditated lynching
It was manslaughter, not murder – this distinction is very important in the USA, where a conviction for first-degree murder is very difficult to live down, especially if you are executed
The Southern Poverty Law Center was lying when it claimed that White Aryan Resistance sent agents to Portland to commit racially-motivated violent crimes – in truth, despite its name, WAR carefully avoided illegality
The prosecution of WAR set a precedent whereby civil law can be used to convict someone of what is really a criminal offense, with a much lower standard of proof
The fascists lost the case because of the hysteria stirred up by the media, politicians, the police and anti-fascists, and because they could not afford a lawyer to counter the wealthy Zionists who prosecuted them. And, it has to be said, because they are not the sharpest tools in the shed.
Neither are some anti-fascists. Those who have read Langer’s analysis don’t understand it any better than the people who wrote the book’s cover notes or the reviewers in the local press, which give the impression that she blindly follows the anti-fascist party line. A good example can be found in an article in the Portland anarchist magazine Little Beirut which simply repeats the SPLC’s distortions in more radical-sounding language (president Bush once described Portland as ‘Little Beirut’, though ‘Little Tel Aviv’ would be nearer the mark). The article, Anti-fascist organizing in Portland 1988-1993, contains no trace of an admission that Mieske’s conviction was unjust, nor that there is anything wrong with evicting a family from its home for its opinions – instead, it celebrates the persecution of Mieske and WAR, and complains that the SPLC’s attack on freedom didn’t go far enough:
‘Tom Metzger, who rightfully occupies center stage in her book, may have been convicted in trial and Ken Mieske, who killed Mulegeta Seraw, may be rotting in Oregon State Penitentiary, but white supremacy and the neo-fascist movement were untouched by the legal machinations.’
I hope readers don’t think I chose Little Beirut deliberately because it is so imbecilic, in order to discredit anti-fascism. I recommend the New Abolitionist group as a more coherent example of a bunch of do-gooders who have listened to too many Neil Young albums, flogging the dead horse of white supremacy –
James Watson, the discoverer of the mechanism by which genetic information is transmitted, lost his job for suggesting that black people might be less intelligent than white people. This genius, whose contribution to understanding life is only surpassed by Darwin and perhaps Mendel, had a lecture tour of the UK canceled, and when he returned to the USA, was fired under pressure from the thought police.
people have been evicted from their home for expressing pro-white racist opinions
a woman was murdered by the FBI because her husband was a white separatist
when liberal academics Mearsheimer and Walt appeared in US cities to promote their bestseller The Israel Lobby, attempts to publicize the event in the local media were often censored
the murder of an American woman by the Israeli army is described as ‘controversial’ in the US media – just like the bombing of Dresden
fascists fare less well in court cases than anti-fascists
implausible accounts of hate crimes are taken seriously by the police
If the North Carolina cops can be politically blackmailed into framing rich white kids on behalf of a clearly unreliable black witness, white power is not the problem. One indication that Jewish, and not white, privilege is more powerful, is how difficult it is to oppose the former, and how easy it is to oppose the latter. This difficulty is both social and psychological. You will get into trouble if you concentrate on criticizing Israel and its supporters. It is also psychologically difficult, even to say the phrase ‘Jewish supremacy’, despite the fact that is obviously as valid a concept as ‘white supremacy’. Today, anyone who argued for the return of apartheid in South Africa would be called a ‘white supremacist’, without hesitation. Supporters of the master race in Israel today should be called ‘Jewish supremacists’, with equal justification, but they are spared this unflattering deconstruction. This in itself is evidence of Jewish privilege. If you held a meeting about white supremacy, the meeting would not be besieged by white supremacists claiming that white supremacy does not exist. If you held a meeting about Jewish supremacy, you would be besieged by Jewish supremacists claiming that Jewish supremacy does not exist. Even if you believe that ethnic privilege and oppression are not particularly useful concepts, it is still revealing that some of these concepts are easier to discuss rationally than others.
The phrase ‘Jewish supremacy’ clearly describes the situation in the Middle East – one small group gains advantages by racially oppressing the rest of the population. The term ‘Jewish privilege’ is more accurate to describe the situation in Western countries. In either case, the word ‘Zionism’ is too mild – it suggests people who are befuddled by an ideology, rather than people benefiting from murder and theft. Thanks to deference to their feelings, Jews, and only Jews, can suppress debate and information which might undermine support for the country in which they, and only they, hold a privileged position; the position of deciding life or death for other people.
So what should you do about hate crimes? The same things as you would do about other violent crimes. An attack on an innocent black person should be treated in the same way as an attack on an innocent white person. Most people I know are more likely to be assaulted by black youths or by the police than by fascists. The only political violence I have encountered was when I was threatened by anarchists for exposing a left-wing group which gave information to the police. And that was before I wrote The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism…
Jay Knott, October 2008
About the Author
‘the only difference is I got the balls to say it…’
Jay Knott runs the Insensitivity Program at the University of Oregon. The name is a pseudonym, in order to make it harder for organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League to spy on him, harass his employer, and so on.
‘Basically, this pamphlet makes the error of blaming US Middle East policy on the so-called Israel Lobby, deflecting attention from the oil industry, letting corporate elites off the hook, and running the risk of playing into the hands of people who hide behind freedom of speech to preach intolerance, diminishing our sense of safety and diversity, and allowing right-wing Zionists to tar all critics of their actions with the same brush, causing legitimate and necessary criticism to be dismissed by apologists for Israel, denying it the corrective feedback that might save it from the worldwide disrespect it now suffers’ Z Magazine
On August 26, 2014, professor Alexis Jay released a report into the grooming of hundreds of girls as young as eleven by gangs of men in the English town of Rotherham. The men’s names were over 90% Muslim. It has subsequently emerged that the phenomenon of grooming, rape, and prostitution of non-Muslim girls is
widespread
ignored by the authorities
denied by the establishment for fear of causing racial tensions
Left-liberal enabling of Muslim paedophile rape gangs before the release of Alexis Jay’s report
“This week it also emerged a council researcher attempted to raise the alarm over sex abuse in Rotherham more than a decade ago – but was threatened, told to ‘never, ever’ repeat the allegations, and put on a diversity course… She said: ‘And her other response was to book me on a two-day ethnicity and diversity course to raise my awareness of ethnic issues.’”
Hiding among the few liberals of integrity are other famous lefties who had a role in covering for the rapists: “Ann Cryer said that Ken Livingstone, the former Mayor of London, was among those who had challenged her for speaking about the issue.”
The Guardian back in 2012 – “Practising Muslims certainly aren’t supposed to have sex with children”: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/may/08/asian-sex-gangs-on-street-grooming and “First, we have the white offenders, who typically offend alone. So far, nothing new: the lone white male is the norm for UK child sex offences. Second, however, there are Asian offenders, many of whom are of Pakistani origin. They seem much more likely to offend in groups, lending their abuse a curiously social dimension”.
The BBC reports on the campaing to suppress a documentary about Muslim rape gangs in 2004:
23 Aug – just before Alexis Jay’s report – Police criticised the Times article, saying: “South Yorkshire Police deeply regrets the decision by The Times newspaper to publish an article about an ongoing, complex and highly sensitive investigation into matters of historic child sexual exploitation.”
An important component of the help given by the left to Muslim rapists is its confusion of race and religion. The right-wing English Defence League, on the other hand, carefully make the distinction, criticizing Islam, not people from south Asia. Unite Against Fascism responds by calling this “racist”.
“But as Nazir Afzal, the chief crown prosecutor in charge of sexual violence and himself of Pakistani heritage, put it, “There is no getting away from the fact that there are Pakistani gangs grooming vulnerable girls.””. No shit.
Another slippery character is the head of the children’s charity Dr. Barnado’s. His name is Javed Khan. Watch him squirm when challenged about his failure to prevent his co-religionists raping children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bscZyOeBpW4.
Afzal and Khan are in positions of authority in the UK in… guarding children from sexual exploitation.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-28963158 – “when we do talk about people coming from a particular ethnic origin, we need to look at the wider statistical context”.
The organization Unite Against Fascism, which helped undermine information about, and opposition to, Muslim child-rape gangs:
“The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry revealed that the police and other institutions are ‘institutionally racist’ and African, Caribbean and Asian people are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system. Therefore it is unlikely that the crimes in Rotherham were not addressed properly due to the social and cultural background of the perpetrators.”
The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry didn’t “reveal” anything – it invented the unanswerable charge “institutional racism”. (See the report “Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics” [PDF]). This is one of the reasons the police were deterred from investigating the Muslim child-rapists.
Unite Against Fascism calls the EDL’s claims about Muslim sexual exploitation racist myths. These claims are neither racist, nor myths, because Islam is not a race, and the claims are true.
“The EDL’s attempts to spread racist myths about sexual exploitation must be exposed and challenged. They seek to blame one community for society’s problems. The EDL does nothing to protect the victims of sexual violence. Sexual predators and paedophiles exist in all communities, as do their victims.”
In lying about, and attempting to suppress, one of the few organizations to open the lid on the Muslim rape gangs, Unite Against Fascism helped perpetuate the abuse.
It’s not the Nazis, it’s the Nazirs we have to worry about! (See below).
“Yesterday Lord Ahmed, who has lived in Rotherham for most of his life, said it was now up to the ‘mosques and community leaders’ to teach ‘moral and ethical values’ lost to the younger generation.”
This gives the impression that the Muslim community is capable of changing its culture of shame, solidarity and cover-up. Maybe Nazir Ahmed, along with Nazir Afzal and Javed Khan, is another slippery defender of criminals with the same religion as himself. Perhaps Islamic culture privileges solidarity between its members over submission to universal values such as telling the truth. One should certainly be free to investigate this possibility without being charged with “racism”.
“Victims were not targeted because they were white” say the man in charge of the child exploitation wing of the Crown Prosecution Service, Nazir Afzal. Unlike his statement “there is no religious basis for the abuse in Rotherham”, this is technically correct. Non-Muslim girls of Indian origin were targeted too. They were targeted because they are not Muslim. Nazir doesn’t say that. The Guardian helps him: http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/03/nazir-afzal-there-is-no-religious-basis-for-the-abuse-in-rotherham
“I’m very clear in that child abuse is not a party-political issue. There have been massive failings everywhere from Oxford to Rochdale and Rotherham to Peterborough. But Ukip want to politicise it.” says MP Simon Danczuk.
That’s not true. If, as Labour MPs have admitted, political correctness was one of the causes of the failure of the authorities to crack down on the Muslim rape gangs, while removing children from UKIP-voting foster parents, it is a very party-political issue.
The BBC is not at all skeptical of the sincerity of the Muslims it interviews:
“In the name of what community cohesion and political correctness? Not in the name of my community,” said Muhbeen Hussain, founder of British Muslim Youth.
“”I’m truly disgusted to see such a report in my home town of Rotherham.
“The fact these guys were predominantly Pakistani heritage men should not be a reason for providing a cloak of invisibility.”
Muhbeen Hussain, founder of the Rotherham Muslim Group: “There is nothing in the Pakistani or Muslim culture that condones such actions…we are asking for prosecutions”…
“I’m a Muslim and if I saw a Muslim person doing something like that then they would not be a Muslim to me.”
Accurate stories of Muslim grooming gangs before August 26, 2014
Andrew Norfolk, Revealed: conspiracy of silence on UK sex gangs, the Times, January 5, 2011:
The EDL clearly explains how the media’s description of the Muslim child-rapists as “Asian” distracts from the role of their religion in encouraging the abuse, and slanders non-Muslim Asians:
Twelve years ago Australian media mentioned ethnicity in relation to rape gangs (Lebanese). The Netherlands tackled the issue (see Easy Meat) http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2002/s607757.htm. The British authorities refused to learn from their experience.
Dan Hodges is right to criticize the denial of the left and powerful Muslims like Javed Khan. But he’s wrong to say it’s about race. The left are circling the wagons because of the rapists’ race. But there is no evidence that their race made them rapists. It’s much more likely that their religion is part of the cause.
This is devastating. Well done Channel Four. But: “Professor Jay’s report concedes that concerns expressed by several councillors that raising the issue of ethnicity could be “giving oxygen” to racist perspectives that could attract extremist political groups and threaten community cohesion were valid to some extent, given the targeting of Rotherham by groups such as the English Defence League.” So “to some extent”, professor Jay thinks, it was understandable for the authorities to allow Pakistanis to rape minors, so as not to help the people protesting against them. To what extent, she doesn’t specify.
The authorities covered up for murder as well as rape: “the council’s safeguarding children board tried to avoid making public a serious case review into the death of 17-year-old Laura Wilson”.
Ukip today accused Labour of “sacrificing the innocence of children” to the “altar of multiculturalism” as it attempted to politicise the Rotherham sex abuse scandal and win votes from disillusioned Northern Labour voters. In an outspoken and stinging attack Ukip’s Yorkshire MEP Jane Collins claimed political correctness had allowed young white girls to be “gang-raped, beaten and threatened at gunpoint” by Muslim men in the town. Ms Collins, who will contest Rotherham at the general election, said Labour politicians who had run the town for years “were morally corrupt and discredited” and dubbed them “liberal lefties to afraid to act through their own political selfishness”.
“It seemed like that word ‘anti-semite’ had so much power over all the people in the gathering” – a reporter on KBOO radio describing the way the allegation of anti-semitism was used to shut up a major campaigner against support for Israeli war crimes, in a supposedly ‘anti-racist’ meeting, in Portland, in April 2010. As if to confirm the power of Zionism in the left, the report was censored.
This is a review of the pamphlet “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere” – by April Rosenblum, April 2007, available from http://thepast.info, subtitled ‘Making resistance to antisemitism part of all our movements‘. It’s part of my ongoing effort to expose the blind spot the American left has for Zionism.
So why do I bother deconstructing crypto-Zionism? First of all, I’ve noticed that there are few people in the world smart enough to do this, and I’m one of them. I care about peace with the Islamic world, a clear priority for the inhabitants of Westen Europe and North America since September 11th 2001.
In some ways, April’s pamphlet is the antithesis of my “The Mass Psychology of Anti-Fascism“, which I produced a year later. I was unaware of April’s effort at the time, otherwise I would have incorporated an uncompromising attack on her pamphlet into mine.
A Zionist thinktank called “The Israel Project” produced a booklet on how to fool the American pc left. April’s pamphlet implements their recommendations. It is basically a Zionist tract in the guise of modern leftism, with lots of references to ‘oppression’ and so on.
I found out about it via a Zionist supporter of the violent leftist group ‘Anti-Racist Action’, accusing anti-war activists in Portland, Oregon, of being anti-semitic. Someone linked to April’s pamphlet via a posting on Indymedia.
Though I reject the politics of “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere“, I am grateful to this individual for having pointed me in this direction. This sugary concoction of self-serving Jewish particularism summarizes better than anything else I have read the attitudes which prevent the anti-racist left from opposing Zionism, by far the most important form of racial violence and discrimination in the Western world. There is more racism among Jews than among all other Western people combined. I can’t speak about Sudan or the Amazon rainforest, but I know Western Europe and North America, I understand Israel, and I am familiar with the Left. I can’t help being part of this society – it’s my duty to fight against the terrible errors which lead us to participate in the genocide of the Palestinian people.
I am not advocating anti-semitism. I am advocating much less concern about it than there is at the moment. This is especially true of the Palestine solidarity movement – our aim is to support the Palestinians against the Jews, and that’s it. Worrying about anti-semitism has not helped this movement: it only enables Zionists and anti-fascists to attack pro-Palestinian advocates.
Being concerned about anti-semitism means supporters of Palestinian rights spend a lot of time and energy defending themselves against this smear. In a left-wing meeting in America, it is enough for a Zionist to call someone ‘anti-semitic’ to shut down debate, divert people from the real problem of Jewish racism, and divide people. This gives power to Zionists. Our aim is to reduce Zionist power. Defending ourselves against the canard hasn’t worked. We need a different approach. We need to flaunt our contempt for the charge of anti-semitism, and laugh at it. We need to not care about it. One example is to make a point of defending the freedom of speech of Holocaust revisionists. This exposes the Zionists hiding in the left, who call us ‘fascists’ just for listening to such controversial speakers. We need to challenge the official story of World War Two, on which much of Israel’s cultural hegemony depends.
On to April’s pamphlet.
The first thing to note is the pamphlet’s style. It is written and laid out like the famous ‘For Dummies’ series (Theoretical Physics for Dummies, etc.). It uses a deceptively casual, friendly tone to try to dictate ideas to the reader, rather than explain them. It pretends it is possible to present complex ideas in a simplistic style with lots of assertions, sidebars and pictures, no attempt to falsify hypotheses, and statements too vague to be testable.
“In the basic ways that it plays out, antisemitism is not so different from the ways that many diaspora communities get scapegoated throughout the world.” (page 4)
So does that mean it is similar to the scapegoating of the Overseas Chinese in Malaya in 1969, or that of Indians in East Africa? No, that is not what April means. If it were, it would mean that anti-semitism is an example of an ethno-economic entity being on the receiving end of resentment from the oppressed. Malays attacked Chinese and Africans attacked Indians because they were privileged. Their wealth was built on oppressing the poor. Admittedly, the ruling elites were even more culpable, but one can understand the resentment toward the middlemen without in any way justifying the violence. But try saying there was a ‘grain of truth’ in equivalent resentment against the Jewish middle class in Russia, Spain and Germany. Of course, that is not what April is saying. She’s saying anti-semitism is special.
This pamphlet is an example of what Gilad Atzmon calls ‘crypto-Zionism’ – a failed attempt to separate Jewish identity from Jewish racism. It is Jewish supremacy disguised as schmaltzy left-wing morality.
April really believes Jews are oppressed. Everything they do, they are victims. When they become rich and rip off other people, it’s because the ruling classes are using them as scapegoats, to divert the poor from their real enemies to the Jews. She says that attacking ‘the Jews’ is a way of diverting people from their real enemy – capitalism. But this simply isn’t true for the Palestinians. Noam Chomsky uses his fame and eloquence to divert people in the opposite direction – he tries to deny the existence of the Israel Lobby, blaming everything on US imperialism.
The idea that anti-semitism is a form of oppression in the Western world today is absurd. There is class oppression, obviously: people mostly go to work because they have no property. There are also irrational forms of hatred, like homophobia. There are hangovers from the past, like racism against black people. But for a Jew to promote the idea that anti-semitism in the West today has anything in common with these real forms of hate against innocent people is hypocritical whining.
The most important form of racial discrimination in the Western countries today is pro-semitism, or philosemitism, to give it its correct name – discriminating in favor of Jews. Whereas the West ditched white apartheid twenty-five years ago, it still supports Jewish apartheid to the hilt, sending the Jewish racist state more money than all other countries combined.
Jews are often involved in campaigns for civil rights for others, as April’s pamphlet reminds us.
“An amazing ½ to ⅔ of the whole Civil Rights workers who went south for instance, are estimated to have been Jews – despite being just 2-3% of the US population… We fought not only because we longed for a better, more beautiful world, but out of deep faith that freedom for all peoples would also, finally, bring freedom and safety for Jews” (page 16).
Not only did Jews want a better, more beautiful world, but in addition, they wanted safety for Jews.
It wasn’t the other way round. They didn’t fight for a better, more beautiful world because it is in Jewish interests to undermine white dominance by advancing the interests of other minorities. Never mind the fact that American Jews are liberal on the US immigration question and not so liberal when it comes to immigration into Israel. Anyone who says that is anti-semitic, aren’t they? So there’s no need to even think about the double standard involved.
In the 1930’s, American Jews were left-wing. So what changed? Why did they move to the right?
Why is the most important Jewish movement in the world today Zionism, and the most important in the USA, neo-conservatism? According to “The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere“, it’s because Jews were persecuted during McCarthyism – two of them were even executed for “supposedly” passing nuclear secrets to the Russians.
April effectively says – if the left allows such vicious anti-semitic pogroms as the execution of the Rosenbergs for handing over nuclear weapon secrets to Russia, well, it can only expect Jews to move to the right, exert influence in the media, use everyone else’s money to support Israel’s war crimes, and send our sons and daughters to die. It’s all because we allow the oppression of Jews.
I oppose the death penalty, but Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were traitors, and April is being dishonest in implying otherwise. In fact, they were Jewish commie traitors. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s true.
She only notices when the Soviet Union was anti-semitic. Never mind when it was pro-semitic, supported the foundation of the state of Israel, and helped Jews oppress other inhabitants of Eastern Europe. If she admitted this, she would say the Jews were being ‘used’ by the Stalinist apparatus. She perpetuates the story we have all heard about the Eastern Front – everyone was guilty, except the Jews, who were always victims. Finally, after 1945, they’d had enough, and founded the state of Israel.
It gets worse.
“Any Jew who comes to understand the nature of their oppression – and who realizes that the liberation of their people touches them more deeply than any clinging attachment to the status quo – cannot help but become a radical. Plenty of Jews haven’t yet had that ‘click’ of awareness” (page 17).
So the problem with Paul Wolfowitz, the bulldozer driver who killed Rachel Corrie, and supporters of the Anti-Defamation League, is that they don’t realize that ‘the liberation of their people’ ‘touches them more deeply’ than the advantages they gain by supporting, or presiding over, ethnic cleansing, by Jews, of Palestinians, using the wealth of white Europeans.
They haven’t yet had that ‘click’ of awareness.
But April and other radical Jews have had it. They ‘realize‘ that the ‘liberation of their people‘ is better served by combatting anti-semitism in the left.
At least white South Africans were honest. They were either honest racists, or honest anti-racists. They didn’t join the anti-apartheid movement in order to cure it of any anti-white prejudice it might contain.
April asks us to ‘bring an understanding of Jewish oppression into Israel/Palestine work‘. Surely that would exclude an understanding of Jewish supremacy?
How does the “understanding of Jewish oppression” help the Palestinians get their rights? Not at all. The problem with the left is not that it tolerates anti-semitism, but that it cares about it.
The traditional anti-racism of the West – undermining white privilege – has failed completely to make a dent in Jewish privilege, Jewish apartheid, and the tremendous support for it in the Western world.
It’s time to ditch that approach and try another. White ethnic interests do not always coincide with Jewish ones. This is certainly true on the Israel/Palestine question, so why should pro-Palestinian activists be afraid of pointing this out? Christianity, whether liberal or conservative, is no friend of Israel. So why not say so? If there are conservative interests opposed to Zionism, then they should be utilized. Never mind the pious humbug called ‘principles’. You know what they say about making an omelette.
According to this pamphlet, part of the problem with anti-Jewish oppression is ‘it allows Jews success’: “Many oppressions rely on keeping the targeted group of people poor” (page 8). Conversely, oppressors tend to be successful. Success makes you an oppressor, whereas failure makes you oppressed. Except for Jews. Jews are victims, even when they are successful.
The ‘middleman’ in early capitalism and the ‘court Jew’ in late feudalism were victims too. When they exploited the poor, they were being used. Perhaps they were. So were the Chinese middle class in Malaya, the Indians in East Africa, the Koreans in Compton, and so on. But they were active agents of oppression too – they weren’t just victims. This ambiguous position is easy to explain in relation to all these middle-class ethno-economic entities – except for the Jews. If you apply the same principles to the Jews you apply to Asian middle classes, you are threatened with loss of your job or even violence. I have clear examples of both of these forms of discrimination.
April claims reasonable liberal complaints about Zionist power are anti-semitic – for example, the argument that the deaths of Jewish children are reported many times more than the deaths of Palestinian children in the media. This is one of the most obvious indicators of Jewish power in the US media, publicized by such moderate organizations as “If Americans Knew“. But for April, it’s an age-old anti-Jewish smear. Never mind the Palestinian children – what’s important is to protect Jews.
According to April, Jews in America after World War II “knew they’d better not rock the boat“. Try telling that to the survivors of the USS Liberty, attacked by Israel in 1967, with the loss of thirty-four men. The Jews didn’t just ‘rock the boat’, they nearly sunk it. American Jews are so powerful, the attack was covered up. What would happen to any other nation attacking an American spy ship?
“For Jews who struggle for social justice, that means we often stay quiet about anti-Jewish oppression” (page 9). You could have fooled me.
The Naqba, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948 by the Jews, was caused, naturally, according to April, by anti-semitism. The poor Jewish survivors of the Holocaust could hardly help themselves emigrating to Palestine and driving out the population of the area. April believes the oppression of the Palestinians is not caused by pro-semitism, but by anti-semitism.
April explicitly says you can criticise some Israeli policies, but not the nation itself. You should not say ‘Zionism is a form of racism’.
She complains bitterly about ‘anti-semitism’ at the UN Conference on Racism, which was boycotted by the major powers because of their pro-Israel stance. because it would contain ‘Israel-bashers’.
They were not concerned about ‘South Africa-bashers’ at conferences against apartheid. Britain, the USA, Australia etc. all condemned South African apartheid, and boycotted it until it fell down. The white countries got rid of the most egregious example of white racism. They find it much harder to get rid of the blatant Jewish racism of Israeli apartheid.
Still, April complains of being oppressed, and I think she believes it. Self-deception is the best form of deception, and it has been a very successful Jewish strategy.
“Zionism is not an insult… it’s a nationalism, and, as so often happens with nationalisms, it has not fully liberated its people and has oppressed others in the process” (page 22). Poor Palestinians. Oppressed in the process of ‘not fully liberating’ Jews.
She tries to tie valid criticisms of Israeli barbarism, such as a cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating children, to ‘blood libels’ such as those used against Jews in Russia and Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. A similar argument was used against those who accused Israel of stealing organs from Palestinians. All I can say is, if you want to stop anti-semitic stereotypes, stop conforming to them.
The weakest point in her pamphlet concerns the Lobby. There is a well-documented idea that politicians have to obey a small clique of powerful Jews, the Israel Lobby, when deciding Israel policy, even when it goes against the USA’s interest. She says this idea is anti-semitic. I hope not, since it’s true. Mearsheimer and Walt’s ‘The Israel Lobby‘, which defends this ‘tail wagging the dog’ hypothesis, is a well-referenced, moderate, academic work, not a piece of Nazi propaganda. If we follow April’s advice, we will be unable to consider the Israel Lobby theory, and a host of other valid questions, because we will be afraid of what these ideas might ‘lead to’. This would impede our attempts to understand, and undermine, the USA’s unconditional support for Israeli aggression. Conversely, if we do want to understand, and undermine, this support, we must reject her call to ‘make resistance to antisemitism part of all our movements‘.
Perhaps realizing the danger of this conclusion, she tries to blackmail us into agreeing with her position; if we don’t ‘make resistance to antisemitism part of all our movements‘, Jews will feel bad and move to the right. And it will be our fault. We must therefore stop ‘anti-Jewish rhetoric’ among pro-Palestinian campaigners, by saying Jews will feel isolated, and support “building up a militarized Israel, with rights reserved for Jews”. We wouldn’t want them to do that, now, would we?
Ethnic cleansing, racial supremacy and mass murder by Jews are the fault of everyone else, April would have us believe. For how long have Jewish activists sung this refrain? How much longer are we going to put up with it? Do we have to wait ’til the last Palestinian is expelled from Palestine, it is illegal to criticize Israel in Europe, and American Muslims are rounded up and put in camps?
She doesn’t attempt to argue against the explanation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq that the US government was maneuvered into it by the Jewish neo-conservative movement. She doesn’t need to – since it’s anti-semitic, it can’t possibly be true.
Same with the ‘myth’ that Hollywood and the media are under Jewish control. She doesn’t provide statistics to refute this idea – she doesn’t need to – she informs us that it makes her feel oppressed, so it can’t possibly be true.
Notice that I am not saying that all these stories about Jewish power are true. I’m saying that, in order to investigate whether they are true, we have to become less concerned about anti-semitism. And I am saying that we should investigate them, since they are a matter of life and death for Palestinians.
April and her friends, whether they know it or not, provide left cover for Israel. Their efforts are holding back the creation of a new anti-apartheid movement.
Like all crypto-Zionists, April refers to ‘the Occupation‘ – the idea that Israel’s rightful borders are the ones she had before the six-day war in 1967, when she annexed the West Bank, etc. – the idea that ethnic cleansing was OK up ’til 1967 but not thereafter. This is a fallback position, in case Israel has to give up the ‘occupied territories’, to make it look like a Jewish racist state with the 1967 borders is legitimate. It’s like the position of some of the Afrikaaners who wanted a small white state after the fall of apartheid. Jewish progressives are the equivalent of white racists – except they want the lion’s share of Palestine, not just a fair slice of the pie. Actually, they want the whole enchilada, but they might have to make do with the main course, leaving a few crumbs for the Palestinians.
In some ways, April’s pamphlet is a parody of itself. If Israel is allowed to continually flout international law, she claims, “some activists start to mistake Jews for a vast powerful network” (page 20). Yes, I must admit to making that mistake myself! Thanks for the correction, April!
The way April uses universal humanism and socialism to cover up her Jewish chauvinism, you might think there was something in the age-old canard about Jews using universalism to cover for their particularism.
I don’t draw that conclusion. I don’t reduce radicalism from the Bolshevik Revolution thru the Vietnam War to ‘Jewish leftism’. But, like anti-semitism, I can only say the best way to oppose this idea it is not to conform to it.
“There’s no shame in thinking critically toward Zionism. But in a world of unresolved antisemitism, there’s also no getting out of fighting this oppression head on” (page 22). I beg to differ. I’ve gotten out of fighting anti-semitism completely, not just ‘head on’. So, according to April, I should feel shame in thinking critically toward Zionism. But somehow, I don’t. I must have something wrong with me.
“There are real reasons why Jews around the world fear losing majority control of Israel. If you fight for the Right to Return, understand the implications it could have for Jews in a world where anti-Jewish oppression has not been solved” (page 23).
In other words, if you don’t consider how Jews feel about it, you have no right to support the Right of Return for Palestinians! This means the ‘Right of Return’ isn’t a right at all. The United Nations resolutions, unconditionally asserting Palestinians’ right to return to the land they were kicked out of in 1948, are wrong, because they don’t consider the implications for Jews.
She argues that “the idea that Jews control the government of the world began with traditional Church authorities passing down images of Jews as a group in league with the Devil” (page 25). Look more closely. First, it takes the most exrteme anti-Zionist position as being mainstream, then it asserts, without evidence, where it ‘began’. This is irrelevant. Present-day analyses of Jewish power should be evaluated on the basis of evidence, not whether they remind us of age-old canards (a canard is a calumny against a cabal).
“It was like somebody flipped a switch“, said a leading campaigner for a boycott of Israeli goods, when she was accused of ‘anti-semitism’ and the audience at a left-wing anti-racist gathering turned against her.
We need to reject this traditional anti-racism. It’s time to rock the boat. And break some eggs.
(This article was originally published on the website Palestine Think Tank, now defunct).
— the language used by American conservatives to justify the current crackdown on free speech?
Republicans opposed cancel culture in academia and elsewhere. Now they are in government, they lecture Europeans about freedom, while organising the biggest crackdown on free speech since McCarthyism: hauling college presidents to inquisitions, firing dissidents, and deporting legal immigrants, for their alleged opinions. There are narrow exceptions to constitutionally protected speech, but these are limited to planning crimes, and incitement to immediate violence. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression explains:
Chutzpah isn’t just a jokey term in Yiddish for breathtaking hypocrisy; it’s a strategy for advancing Jewish interests. It means the only criterion for deciding what to say, write, or advocate, is not “is it true?” but “does it advance Jewish interests?”
How else to describe the Orwellian inversions which we hear and view every day?
— There have been numerous protests in universities, against the Israeli genocide. Zionist Jews and their politicians claim these protests are for the genocide of Jews.
— Politicians have claimed “Israel doesn’t need America; America needs Israel”: the opposite of the truth.
— Zionists claim their critics say “Zionists” when they mean “Jews”; in reality, Zionists say “Jews” when they mean “Zionists.”
— In a double lie, they falsely claim students are breaking the law by expressing sympathy for Hamas, and persuade administrations and government departments to expel and arrest them.
— It is not illegal to express sympathy for Hamas, and
— no evidence of any of those targeted expressing such sympathy has been produced.
The claims of Zionism are ridiculous, yet the most powerful government on earth is completely committed to them.
Government and Zionist proclamations on the “antisemitism crisis” in academia bear a striking resemblance to the campaign against “racism,” which reached a climax during 2020. The premises of both campaigns are false. There is no evidence that George Floyd was murdered for being black. Black students at Yale, Evergreen, etc. have not experienced racial discrimination. Neither have Jews at Harvard, Columbia, etc.. Every protest against the Israeli genocide has included a significant Jewish contingent. What has upset some Jews — the racialists — has been the criticism of Israel. It makes them feel unsafe:
The women who run the universities have accommodated the Jewish supremacists as cravenly as they did other minority activists. But the Jewish assault on freedom is worse than woke. It is backed by the government, and reinforced by the withdrawal of funds from non-compliant institutions, expulsions, arrests, and the threat of deportation. Most importantly, it helps Israel commit genocide, by undermining opposition to it within its most important supporter.
The manipulations of America and other open societies by different minority activists look similar because they exploit the same weakness: the eagerness with which people of European descent, despite, or because of, their unique efforts to end discrimination, are prepared to accept allegations of harbouring prejudice. The nearest thing I am aware of, to an explanation of that weakness, is Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, by Kevin MacDonald; I don’t know if I agree with it.
Supporters of Israel refer to it as “the Jewish state.”
Critics rarely use that term. Some even argue “It is not a Jewish state.”
I am a Jew. I renounce slaughter. I renounce genocide, I renounce child murder. I renounce Israel. It is not a Jewish state. There is nothing Jewish about genocide.
The reaason is, these critics are intimidated by the word ‘antisemitism.’ While the left overuses the allegation ‘racism,’ the right cries ‘antisemitism,’ to smear opponents of Israel’s crimes. On 7/10/23, the right adopted a far more comprehensive ‘cancel culture’ than the one they oppose.
When asked why the USA gives unconditional support to Israel, both right and left mostly argue Israel is America’s ally. The right think this is a good thing; the left tends to argue that it is an expression of European colonialism, or a tool of US imperialism. Over and again, one finds leftists on social media labeling Israel ‘white supremacy.’ Apartheid South Africa was an implementation of white supremacy. Israel? White supremacy! The intellectual gymnastics the left performs to avoid the J-word could win Olympic medals.
Almost twenty years ago, Michael Neumann savaged the tactical ineptitude of left-wing anti-Zionists, claiming they put feelings before facts: “What’s the welfare of the Palestinians compared to the left’s emotional commitment to anti-imperialism?”
If Israel is a tool of the US, it follows that patriotic Americans should support Israel. It is both more accurate and more effective to argue that Israel’s relationship to the US is parasitic. Perhaps some on the left are worried that arguing it is unpatriotic to support Israel could lead patriots into… white supremacy. As if that remote possibility is worth considering, in the context of the daily genocide being carried out, not by Nazis or the KKK, but by the Jewish state.
Others argue that the USA supports Israel, even when Israel’s interests are at variance with its own, because US politicians are selected for their eagerness to serve the interests of Jews. The most obvious example of this selection process is the millions of dollars the Jewish organisation AIPAC donates to the campaigns of pro-Israel candidates.
I believe that it’s impossible to resolve this issue by accumulating evidence for one side or the other. For example, the fact that Israel attacks countries which are not US-aligned doesn’t show that it’s doing it on behalf of America, as Caitlin Johnstone believes. It could just as well be that these countries are not US-aligned because the USA supports Israel.
The evidence doesn’t tell us whether the groveling of US politicians toward their Israeli counterparts is a reflection of Jewish power in the USA, or whether they’re just pretending, in order to cover up for the role of Israel in acting for American hegemony in the oil-rich geostrategic blah-blah-blah.
The reason I favour the ‘Jewish power’ explanation of the competition among politicians for who can genuflect to Israel and its supporters most fervently, is that it’s the most parsimonious description of the data.
Mearsheimer and Walt, in their book The Israel Lobby, ask the right question:
– US presidents mildly criticize Israeli policies
– Israeli politicians express open contempt for the supposedly most powerful man in the world, bragging of how ‘The Jewish Lobby’ (their words) will bring this uppity goy into line
– And so it comes to pass…
is this all
1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel in order to cover up for US hegemony, by diverting attention to the Jews, or
2. is the most elegant/economical/likely explanation that Jewish power trumps US interests?
Let’s make it simple. Given all the examples of US politicians groveling to Israel, is this a facade to disguise the fact that Israel is really subordinate to the US empire, or is the most parsimonious explanation, that Israel really does tell US politicians what to do?
Since 7/10/23, it has been difficult to keep track of the examples of politicians falling over each other to compete in groveling to the Jewish state and its supporters. To take one example, the Antisemitism Awareness Act passed 320 to 91 in the House of Representatives, though it clearly violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution. For example, it proposes to penalise
“denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.”
(An aside: Caitlin Johnstone, bless her, is a committed critic of Israel. She would argue that claiming Israel is racist does not deny the Jewish people their right to self-determination: https://x.com/caitoz/status/1806497727272071622?t=7DOueWdBMkLCwu8FYNHvNA&s=19. I would rather say I don’t care if it does deny them that right.)
Witness the rabid attacks on academic freedom, with politicians regularly claiming that university protests against genocide are comparable to the genesis of the Nazi party.
It is far more parsimonious to describe the groveling as a result of Jewish power, than to describe it as a facade to make it look like a result of Jewish power.
One reason the Palestine solidarity movement has been so spectacularly unsuccessful, contrasted to the anti-apartheid campaign, is that it doesn’t point to the cause of the problem it is trying to solve: the power of Jews in Western institutions, media, and culture, particularly in the USA. Jewish power is difficult to oppose because of the power of Jews. Part of this power is our fear of repeating what happened when Jews were singled out in the past.
But until we point to the real cause of the West’s support for genocide, we are at best wasting our time.
Most, but not all, the left, denies that the Israel Lobby is the most significant factor in the support given to Israel by the USA and its allies. I’ll give three examples. One from Noam Chomsky, one from Britain’s Socialist Workers Party, and one, from someone I like.
Caitlin Johnstone says that “the ‘Israel lobby’ is really the western empire lobby”.
This means that the Lobby transmits imperial interests to Israeli leaders. Moreover, it implies that the money poured by the Lobby into influencing politicians to support Israel unconditionally is an effort to remind them that this is in the interests of the US empire.
The SWP is more aggressive: “It is important to stress the primary role of imperialism in this analysis, which means rejecting explanations that emphasize the supposed power of a “Zionist lobby,” or, worse, a “Jewish lobby.”” – International Socialism 181, page 45.
Given his exceptional grasp of logic, Noam Chomsky is remarkably contradictory on the Israel Lobby. In his 1999 book Fateful Triangle, on page 337, he refers to the normal state of politics in the USA as “complete obedience” to Zionism. But on page 462, he regrets Israel’s “dependence on the US with the concomitant pressure to serve US interests”.
By waffling vaguely about oil, domination, and hegemony, leftists give the impression that Israel is a tool of US imperialism. Right-wing politicians claim an attack on Israel is an attack on the USA. Both left and right give the impression that support for Israel is in US interests.
The USA and Israel do have interests in common. When Israel acts in accordance with these common interests, it is impossible to tell if the dog wags the tail, or vice-versa. When their interests differ, Israel goes its own way, and its politicians openly brag of biting the hand which feeds them. No other country can get away with this. There are British troops in Iraq; there are no Israeli ones. There’s no British Lobby. Britain obeys America; Israel doesn’t. With a few minor exceptions, Israel has always been able to defy the USA.
In his 2005 essay, The Palestinians and the Party Line, Michael Neumann argues persuasively that Israel offers the USA nothing, and America would gain more from friendly relations with the other Middle Eastern countries than from bombing them: https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/11/18/the-palestinians-and-the-party-line/.
The USA didn’t suddenly find, on 7 October 2023, that it was in its imperialist interests to exterminate the people of Gaza.
Mearsheimer and Walt’s 2007 book The Israel Lobby asks and answers the right question.
– US presidents mildly criticize Israel
– Israeli politicians express open contempt for the supposedly most powerful man in the world, bragging of how ‘the Jewish Lobby’ (their words) will bring this uppity goy into line
– And so it comes to pass
Is this
1. an elaborate charade to make it look as if the Lobby can determine US policy regarding Israel, in order to cover up for US hegemony, by diverting attention to the Jews, or
2. is the most economical explanation that Jewish power trumps American interests?
In court, a witness who asserts something too strenuously sometimes persuades the jury that he doesn’t really believe it.
“We write to affirm our support for our strategic partnership with Israel… The US has traditionally stood with Israel because it is in our national security interest… Israel is our strongest ally in the Middle East… Israel is also a partner to the US on military and intelligence issues in this critical region. That is why it is our national interest to support Israel…” – Senate resolution, 21 June 2010.
Immediately after 7 October 2023, politicians fell over themselves to declare fealty to Israel. Nikki Haley led the way, by asking Congress to give Israel everything she needs. “An attack on Israel is an attack on America.” Haley is particularly reliable at saying the opposite of the truth: “Israel doesn’t need America. America needs Israel.”
Deviation from submission to the interests of a foreign country is routinely denounced as treason.
Israel is the only country which American politicians openly say should kill children.
Israel Lobby or Jewish Lobby?
Jews tend to have, or believe they have, interests in common, and they are good at defending them. I believe this is an extension of genetic interests, and it should be uncontroversial. A detailed account can be found in another essay I wrote for Dissident Voice, Invention, Imagination, Race, and Nation: https://dissidentvoice.org/2013/10/invention-imagination-race-and-nation/.
The fact that almost all Americans have no ethnic interest in supporting Israel is not an argument that the left can use.
I use the term ‘Israel Lobby’ to cover organizations like AIPAC whose task is to ensure US politicians support Israel. ‘Jewish Lobby’ includes organizations which additionally defend Jewish interests in other areas. For example, the Anti-Defamation League does more than slander critics of Israel. Elon Musk and others have complained that the ADL is ‘far left.’ This is because it exaggerates ‘white supremacy,’ and so on. It’s left-wing when this serves Jewish interests, and right-wing when this serves Jewish interests.
Why don’t Israel’s left-wing critics state the obvious? I can’t be sure, but there is tremendous pressure on all of us not to be ‘antisemitic.’ Fear of this allegation is deep-rooted, perhaps deeper than fear of any other ludicrous allegation of racism.
Thus there is a paradoxical correlation between the woke, antiracist ideas of the left, and the allegations of antisemitism which stream continuously from the right. Both take advantage of our weakness, our fear of being labeled, or even of being, bigoted.
We need to lose that fear, and just seek the truth. More precisely, try to find the most parsimonious description of the data. To claim that US support for Israel is in US interests requires intellectual gymnastics. To say that it is the result of Jewish lobbying requires little more than observing the behavior of Jewish organizations, and the response of the establishment.
How lobbies work is no great mystery. There’s a bug in democracy. Most of America wants cheap steel, but congressmen from steel states insist on adding steel tariffs to unrelated bills, or they won’t vote for them, so the other states give in. The Israel Lobby is a bit more complicated. Representative Ilhan Omar pointed to the simple fact that a significant minority of Jews have a lot of money, and use it to persuade politicians to back Israel. She was forced into a groveling apology, using the woke language of the Democrats, for fear of losing her seat, proving her point. But it’s not just ‘the Benjamins.’ Additional power is given to the Lobby by the craven fear of being accused of ‘antisemitism’ which permeates the American polity.
On 8 May 2024, the Guardian asked if the dog wags the tail, or vice-versa:
Jewish power in American politics meant President Biden was powerless to halt arms shipments in order to persuade Netanyahu to halt the invasion of Rafah.
Max Blumenthal, speaking at the University of Massachusetts, explains how Israel acts contrary to US interests, and to the interests of US imperialism:
The most parsimonious, and thus, the most likely, explanation of the subservience of the USA to Israel, is the power of the Israel Lobby. The tail wags the dog.
the jay report 
